League of Nations

“I believe there exists, spiritually, a great suspension bridge, ‘made without hands, eternal, in the heavens,’ a bridge connecting Philadelphia, Penn’s city of Brotherly Love,—and the city of Geneva,” wrote Violet Oakley.¹ Although the United States had officially rejected membership in the League of Nations, Oakley remained committed to the idea of international government. Believing that the league was the fulfillment of William Penn’s vision of a “Parliament of Nations” in 1693, she felt compelled to be a part of and to record the momentous development in world history on behalf of the United States. To obtain permission to attend the league, she asked Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot to present a copy of her portfolio The Holy Experiment: A Message to the World from Pennsylvania (1922) to the league’s library to serve as an introduction.² With The Holy Experiment as her calling card, she gained admittance to the eighth, ninth, and tenth sessions of the assembly.

Accompanied by Edith Emerson, she set up a studio in an apartment in Geneva, where she painted The Drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations and drew portraits of the international community assembled there from 1927 to 1929. Twenty-five delegates agreed to pose for Oakley as well as sixteen members of the Secretariat and International Labor Office, and thirteen observers and visitors. The artist’s mastery of drawing made it possible for her to quickly render an expressive likeness with combinations of red, black, and white chalk on toned paper. In her eyes the diversity of delegates from all over the world formed a beautiful human tapestry: “To the Imaginative Observer they seemed to be weaving an intricate and gorgeous pattern made up of all the colours of the world, and of all the creeds.”³

Oakley’s League of Nations portraits were exhibited in Geneva, Florence, London, Rome, and Toronto and in cities on the East Coast of the United States. In 1930, Emerson and Oakley showed their “Geneva Drawings” together at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. After having the delegate portraits reproduced as collotypes, Oakley donated the originals to the Library of the League of Nations.⁴ In 1933, she published the collotypes and her Journal of Geneva, with reproductions of her murals in the Supreme Court Chamber in the portfolio Law Triumphant: Containing the Opening of the Book of the Law and The Miracle of Geneva.

For Oakley, the work of the delegates was an act of spiritual service to the world comparable to the ministry of Jesus Christ. She portrayed this idea in a contemporary variation on Christ washing the feet of the apostles in John 13:1–17. Christ at Geneva depicted Jesus in a loincloth washing the feet of one of the delegates who are seated around a horseshoe-shaped table in the Glass Room of Palais Wilson, with Mont Blanc in the background. Oakley offered the large mural painting (seven feet by six feet) to the League of Nations but it was rejected on the grounds that sectarian religious imagery was opposed to the international principles of the organization. To give the image wider exposure, Oakley published the brochure Christ at Geneva with a black-and-white reproduction of the painting. In 1937, Henri-Pierre Hoffer, who had served on the League of Nations Intellectual Cooperation and International Bureaux Section, persuaded Oakley to rename the painting La présence divine à la Société des Nations/Divine presence at the League of Nations and publish a new brochure with his commentary in English and French and a black-and-white reproduction of the painting. The work eventually found a home in the Moral Re-Armament headquarters in London.

¹ The internal quote is from 2 Corinthians 5:1. Violet Oakley, Law Triumphant: Containing the Opening of the Book of the Law and the Miracle of Geneva (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1933): 14. Oakley’s metaphor corresponded to the construction of the suspension bridge across the Delaware River from 1922 to 1926. Supervised by architect Paul Cret, the concept was originally sketched by Pennsylvania Capitol architect Joseph M. Huston in 1913.

² Ibid. 45. Gifford Pinchot, a Republican and a Progressive, was governor of Pennsylvania from 1923 to 1927 and 1931 to 1935.

³ Ibid. 40.

⁴ The Geneva Drawings exhibitions were held at Galerie Moos, Geneva, 15 Sept. – 2 Oct., 1928; The Lyceum Club, Florence, Italy, June, 1929; American Women’s Club, London, 18-22 July, 1929; The Art Alliance, Philadelphia, January, 1930;Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, February, 1930;The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., April, 1930; Art Gallery of Toronto, Canada, May, 1930; Grace Horne’s Gallery, Boston, 4-18 June, 1930; Vassar College, August, 1930; Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, Delaware, 18-28 Oct., 1930; Yale University, 19-31 January, 1931; Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, New York, February, 1932;Palm Beach Art Center, Florida, 25 Feb. – 5 Mar., 1936; Palazzo Antici Matti, Rome, Italy, 1937.