The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love - Hardcover

Carter, Alice A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810944375 ISBN 13: 9780810944374

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2000

Synopsis

Illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) and Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954), and muralist Violet Oakley (1874-1961) captivated early-20th-century society with their brilliant careers and uncommon lifestyle. This richly illustrated biography traces the lives of these three talented women, who took over the Red Rose Inn, a picturesque old estate on Philadelphia's Main Line, and made a pact to live together forever-until one of them created havoc by leaving the fold to marry.

Revealing a household of intimate friendship, mutual inspiration, shared ideas, and love, The Red Rose Girls unfolds against a backdrop of the emerging women's rights movement in an era when female sexuality was still little understood or publicly acknowledged. It is an unforgettable story of three extraordinary women artists who achieved success on their own terms.

Full-color reproductions of the Red Rose Girls' artwork and wonderful archival photographs bring these women and their milieu to life.

175 illustrations, 60 in full color, 8 1/2 x 11"

ALICE A. CARTER is a professor at the School of Art and Design at San Jos State University. An award-winning illustrator who has done extensive work in the entertainment industry and in advertising, she is also the author of The Art of National Geographic.

About this title

About the Author

Alice A. Carter is a professor in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University.

Reviews

Three of the first American women artists to achieve fame and fortune in the Victorian era--Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley--lived unconventional lives marked by a remarkable degree of collaboration. In this fascinating but incomplete study, Carter explores the trio's internecine artistic and romantic relations, sparked during their studies at the renowned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Smith's idyllic representations of children in her Child's Garden of Verses remain well known. Green's art-nouveau paintings graced the covers of most of the popular magazines of her day, including Collier's and Harper's. Oakley, the youngest of the group, was the first American woman granted serious commissions, including a series of murals for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in 1911. For 17 years, the three committed themselves to each other as "sympathetic companions" and artistic collaborators, sharing a studio in Philadelphia and then an estate, the Red Rose Inn, in Villanova, Pa., where another companion, Henrietta Cozens, served as the "wife" of the household. As the women's fame grew, the press lauded their accomplished m?nage ? quatre (not considered a disgrace in the days when "Boston marriages" were presumed to be asexual). But when Green married at 39 after a seven-year engagement, Oakley's devastation created a scandal and severed the group's artistic partnership. Carter builds a solid foundation but never fully fleshes out the artists or their romantic association, though the exquisite illustrations are worth the price of admission. 115 b&w and 60 color illus. Agent, John Campbell. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Imagine women living and painting in a genteel world of rose gardens, an environment in which creative ideas can cross-pollinate, and yet each woman maintains her own artistry, neither diluted nor overshadowed by that of the others. Illustrators Jessie Wilcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green and illustrator and muralist Violet Oakley created and enjoyed such a life. The three were dubbed "the Red Rose girls" by illustrator Howard Pyle because of their shared living-studio space in the Red Rose Inn, a Philadelphia Main Line estate they rented with Henrietta Cozens, Smith's companion and overseer of the household. They embraced the nineteenth-century aesthetic of sentiment and narrative in their work, succeeded on their own terms, and vowed to live together forever, forsaking marriage. Early-twentieth-century society created a large audience for their art, and all was, well, rosy until Green defected to marry a man. Whether or not the four had been two lesbian couples, their shared strength, creative ideas, and love of one another and of beauty live on, in the story and the artwork they left behind, as examples of feminist independence and evidence of female success in a male-dominated world. With its many lavish color illustrations and reference photos, this is a gorgeous coffee-table book--and much more. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810944375
• ISBN 13: 9780810944374
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216