Westtown School, West Chester, Pennsylvania

Violet Oakley painted her last mural—for Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania—when she was eighty years old. The commission stemmed from Edith Emerson’s lecture on Oakley’s life and work there in 1953. Established by the Philadelphia Meeting of the Society of Friends in 1799, the school decided on a mural that would pay homage to the founder of the Quaker religion, George Fox

Oakley had painted George Fox on the Mount of Vision fifty years earlier for the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room of the Pennsylvania State Capitol. At Westtown School she reprised this composition with a few changes in a mural over the fireplace in the South Room of the Main Building. Oakley portrayed Fox crying out on the promontory of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England. On the lower right she included an abridged quote from William Penn on this moment of revelation in Fox’s life: “Upon the mountain he was moved of the Lord to sound out his great and notable day.” In the manner of the frames made by Bucks County Quaker artist Edward Hicks for his Peaceable Kingdom paintings, Oakley inscribed the border of her mural with Fox’s own words: "I Saw an Ocean of Darkness and Death / But an Ocean of Light and Love Which / Flowed over the Ocean of Darkness / In That Also I Saw the Infinite Love of God." In the governor’s reception room, Oakley had painted Fox in an ominous landscape, but at Westtown School she placed him above a bright, verdant valley to symbolize the Quaker “inner light” overcoming darkness. Oakley completed George Fox on Pendle Hill, 1652 by October 1956 and the work was presented to Westtown School as a gift from an anonymous alumnus.