Yarnall House, "The House of Wisdom"

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In 1908, Charlton Yarnall and his wife, Anna Brinton Coxe, descendants of old Philadelphia families, engaged the architectural firm of Frank Miles Day and Brother to build their new townhouse at 17th and Locust Streets, a fashionable district a block from Rittenhouse Square. Day, an advocate of the Arts and Crafts philosophy and co-founder, with Wilson Eyre, of House and Garden magazine, designed the stately four-and-a-half story Jacobean revival residence with ironwork by the young Samuel Yellin, leaded-glass windows by Nicola d’Ascenzo, and murals by Violet Oakley. Day was the architect of Cogslea, the Colonial Revival home and studio that Oakley shared with illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green in West Mount Airy. Oakley was nationally famous for her mural series in the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room of the Pennsylvania State Capitol when Day offered her a commission to decorate the reception hall of the Yarnall house in 1909.

Paneled in Circassian walnut with intricately carved and coffered barrel vaults at each end, the reception hall required thirteen murals of various shapes and sizes and a stained glass dome. Oakley united the components in an original allegorical program inspired by Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath buildeth her house.” The Building of the House of Wisdom was an extended metaphor in which the stages of human development and the floors of a house correspond to the stages of civilization.

Three lunettes depict Oakley’s interpretation of the Ages of Man with a contemporary family not unlike the Yarnalls. The Child and Tradition takes place at the foot of a double staircase where a young child listens to stories told by his mother and his nurse. The child imagines the figures who appear on the stairs: Confucius, Solomon, Cicero, and Dante and Beatrice. In the barrel vault above, octagonal panels depict three episodes in the myth of Hercules: Hercules Strangling Serpents; the Choice of Hercules; and the Apotheosis of Hercules. The panel is inscribed with a verse from Ecclesiastes 3:15 (“That which has been is now, and that which shall be hath already been”) and bordered with garlands of foliage, flowers, fruit, and urns, emblematic of the cycle of life.

Youth and the Arts, the next lunette in the series, takes place on a balcony. This stage is represented by five young adults playing musical instruments, singing, and perusing a book of prints. The lunette is inscribed with a verse from Psalm 144:12: “I will sing a new song to thee upon an instrument of ten strings . . . that our sons may be as plants grown up in their Youth. And our Daughters as cornerstones polished.” The theme is echoed in the border with musical scores, organ pipes, and wind and string instruments.

The final stage is Man and Science, represented by several generations of a family gathered on a rooftop in Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, to witness the flight of an airplane, anticipated centuries earlier by Leonardo da Vinci. The family group recalls Andrea Mantegna’s fresco of the court of the Ludovico Gonzaga family in the Camera degli Sposi. The lunette is inscribed with a verse from Psalm 8:4: “What is man? Thou art mindful of him. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou hast put all things under his feet.” Combined with the idea of flight, the quotation provides the motifs for the border of doves and crowns. Arching over Man and Science, three octagonal panels in the barrel vault pay homage to technological innovations: the telegraph, Communion throughout Space; electricity, The Search for Light; and manned flight, The Conquest of the Heavens or, Aviation. From the Ages of Man, the theme is carried upward to the Ages of Civilization, symbolized by innovations in building in the four pendentives: Dwellers in Tents and Wanderers in the Desert, Egyptian Foundation or, Egyptian Pyramid, Michelangelo and the Dome of the Renaissance, and The High Tower, bringing the history of architecture up to date.

Manufactured by Nicola d’Ascenzo Studios in Philadelphia, the stained glass dome was eight and a half feet in diameter. As the main source of light in the paneled room, it was composed primarily of white glass with blue and black accents. Oakley personified Wisdom as a veiled woman, a symbolist figure reminiscent of the imagery of Elihu Vedder, whom Oakley visited in Rome when she went abroad to work on the Yarnall commission in 1909. Swirling around Wisdom are the mythical Aurae, the daughters of the Four Winds who ask where wisdom is to be found. Their answers—Ask, Seek, Knock—are written in books, resting on the backs of turtles, whose pages are held open by dolphin-riding putti. The dome is ringed with a wide blue and white border representing the sea edged with a band of fish and shells.

The Building of the House of Wisdom remained in place for fifty years, although the property had several owners after the Yarnall family. In the 1960s, when the American Red Cross acquired the building and began to renovate it, Edith Emerson, director of Woodmere, was given the opportunity to remove Oakley’s decorations in order to preserve them in the collection. In the process, the stained glass dome fell and shattered. Original drawings for the dome have survived. Twelve of the thirteen mural elements were extracted successfully, but The High Tower pendentive could not be separated from its architectural setting. It apparently had come loose at some point, and had been reglued with a very strong adhesive. Emerson had no choice but to leave The High Tower in place, where—alas—it was sanded, primed, and painted over with house paint.

In 2017, the building’s owner, the Honorable Allan Domb, gave Woodmere permission to “excavate” and extract whatever remained. Woodmere Deputy Director for Exhibitions Rick Ortwein literally cut into plaster walls, digging through layers of paint with a razor. Conservator Steven Erisoty removed layers of house paint and primer to find that The High Tower had lost its surface markings. The finished painting is gone, but the work nonetheless reveals Oakley’s first pass in building the image and demonstrates her process. The High Tower remains an object of interest and beauty, and Woodmere is thrilled to complete the mural cycle.