Germantown Friends School

Violet Oakley’s murals in the Pennsylvania State Capitol comprised a pictorial history of William Penn that introduced the founder’s life and ideas to countless schoolchildren. When the Germantown Friends School graduating Class of 1924 wanted to give their alma mater a gift, they asked Oakley to design their school seal. She composed a theme that reconnected the school, founded in 1845, with its ancestral religious roots in the Germantown Friends Meeting established a few years after Penn’s arrival in 1682. Penn had called the city he founded “Philadelphia,” the name of an early persecuted Christian congregation mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Oakley derived the seal’s emblem and motto from Revelation 3:7-8, in which John of Patmos is divinely inspired to send a reassuring message “to the angel of the church in Philadelphia” stating, “I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.” Oakley interpreted the verse with the image of a youth, dressed in ancient garb with wide, wing-like sleeves, stepping through an open, nail-studded door that resembled the one in her studio at Cogslea. The black-and-white seal was reinterpreted in color by the Willet Stained Glass Studios and installed in the school’s Taulane Auditorium as a gift from the Class of 1946 for their fiftieth reunion in 1996.