Fleisher Art Memorial

Violet Oakley was commissioned to create the Life of Moses altarpiece by Samuel S. Fleisher (1871–1944), an advocate of public art education and one of Philadelphia’s most admired citizens. The grandson of German Jewish immigrants, Fleisher became vice president of his family’s worsted woolen mill in Southwest Philadelphia after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. In 1898, he established the Graphic Sketch Club at the Jewish Union building at 422 Bainbridge Street to provide free art lessons to the working-class residents of South Philadelphia. To meet the growing demand for classes, he purchased the building vacated by Saint Martin’s College for Indigent Boys on Catherine Street in 1915. Seven years later, he acquired the adjacent Episcopal Church of the Evangelists, built in 1884–86 by Louis C. Baker and E. James Dallett of the Philadelphia architecture firm Furness and Evans, which he planned to preserve as a museum for the school.

In 1923, Fleisher received the Philadelphia Award, designed by Oakley, for his contributions to the cultural life of the city. When he saw the exhibition of Oakley’s mural panels for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court at the Sesquicentennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1926, he was so impressed by her painting of Moses in The Decalogue, he asked her to design an altarpiece with a similar theme for the church sanctuary. Although she was headed to Geneva to attend the League of Nations sessions, she agreed to work on the commission afterward in Florence, where experienced craftsmen could construct the altarpiece.

Oakley, who had designed an Ascension altarpiece for All Angels Church in 1900, had recently employed the early Renaissance art form in her murals The Legend of the Latchstring and The Slave Ship Ransomed (1919–20) in the Pennsylvania Senate Chamber and The Great Wonder: A Vision of the Apocalypse (1923–24) in the Vassar College Alumnae House. Like the Ascension, the altarpiece for the sanctuary would be a reredos, a vertical panel at the back of the altar facing the congregation. To coordinate with the church architecture, she chose the single panel format of the vita icon in which a large central image of a saint is flanked by smaller biographical scenes and in the predella, as in the Saint Francis altarpiece in the Bardi Chapel of the Basilica of Santa Croce. The monumental structure, seventeen by eight feet, is composed of gilded wood with inset panels painted in oil on canvas. Since Fleisher planned the altarpiece as a memorial to his mother, Oakley represented Pharoah’s Daughter and the Infant Moses as a Madonna and Child. The striking image of the dark-skinned Egyptian Madonna embracing the light-skinned Jewish child made a rhetorical statement about the power of maternal behavior to transcend racial and religious prejudice. At the peak of the altarpiece, Oakley included a vignette of the child Moses with his biological mother, Jochebed. The small biographical scenes depicted events in Moses’s life from Exodus: on the left, The Seven Daughters of Jethro, The Burning Bush, Return into Egypt, and Pharaoh Defieth the Lord; on the right, The Plagues of Egypt, The Institution of the Passover, The Exodus of the Children of Israel, and The Hosts of Pharaoh Overwhelmed. In the predella, from left to right are The Ten Commandments (a copy of the Supreme Court panel), Fruits of the Promised Land, and Water Smitten from the Rock.

The challenge, Oakley remarked, was “to create an Italianesque reredos for a Romanesque church, preserving the Egyptian flavor and symmetry without making the decoration conventionally Egyptian.”¹ Her design solution was an original synthesis of traditional Christian iconography with contemporary Art Deco stylization and color palette that emerged from the “Egyptomania” craze following the excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.

Renamed the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial after Fleisher’s death in 1944, the free public art school he founded has operated for more than a century in its original buildings, including the Sanctuary and the Life of Moses altarpiece, which were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

¹ Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 24, 1929.