Philadelphia Award

The Philadelphia Award was established in 1921 by Edward W. Bok (1863–1930) to honor the individual who had best served the interests of the community in the preceding year. Bok worked for the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia and, under his editorship, the Ladies’ Home Journal became the first magazine in the world to have one million subscribers in 1903. He expanded the purview of the magazine from household advice to domestic architecture and interior design and informed readers about fraudulent patent medicines, urban blight, and threats to national parks. He hired women illustrators and featured the work of professional women photographers. When he retired from publishing, he continued his civic mission by establishing the Philadelphia Award, a gold medal and a cash prize (then $10,000) to reward and encourage service to the community. “The Founder believes that service to others tends to fill life with joy and renders whole communities prosperous,” the trustees of the award stated, “and that the Ideal of service as a test of good citizenship should be kept before the minds of the people of Philadelphia in general, and the young in particular.”¹

Bok had known Violet Oakley since 1897, when she sold illustrations to the Ladies’ Home Journal. He commissioned her to design the Philadelphia Award’s medal, the casket to hold it, and the scroll inscribed with the name of the recipient. Oakley designed the obverse of the medal with a half-length figure of the young William Penn to inspire the city’s youth. The reverse side is a scene of Jesus washing the feet of an apostle from John (13:1–17), symbolizing public service. Rather than being struck from a die, the medal was cast from a mold made from Oakley’s plaster relief sculpture “in the tradition of Pisanello and the great Italian medalists of the Renaissance rather than to the French School, more recently in vogue.”²

To house the medal, Oakley designed a footed, domed chest made of walnut and covered with ivory plank, hand-wrought copper hinges, corner braces and latch. The motto of Penn’s coat-of-arms, Dum Clavum Rectum Teneam (“May I hold the right key”) was inscribed on the lock, and a tiny angelic figure was placed on the clasp. A quote from the founder was incised across the front: “By Love Serve One Another.” The interior was lined with sapphire blue velvet that intensified the gleam of the gold medal. Douglas Gilchrist, the instructor in metalwork at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, fabricated the casket.

Each recipient of the Philadelphia Award also received a vellum scroll illuminated with Oakley’s calligraphy in black, red, and blue stating their name and contribution, signed by the nine trustees who selected the winner. The first award was bestowed on Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in a ceremony at the Academy of Music on March 9, 1922.

¹ Edith Emerson, “The Philadelphia Award,” American Magazine of Art 13 (May 1922): 156.

² Ibid. 157.