The Red Rose Girls

Artists who lived together, first at the Red Rose Inn in Villanova and later in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, and who vowed to stay together their whole lives – though Green married at age 40 and left the ménage. Each achieved acclaim in the early 1900s, Smith and Green as illustrators, Oakley as muralist. For more information, consult – as I did – Alice A. Carter’s The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love, 2000.

Jessie Wilcox Smith:
Born, she’d say, in the month of clematis,
nothing morbid or bitter could ever flower
from her paint-brush, but only young creatures 
in groping wonder at their vernal world: this child,
all hat and belled-out dress, standing on her own white hem
as she thinks to garden; or that child toasting serge-socked toes,
burnt orange at the orange parlor fire. Who did not like them – 
children – much herself, finding rather in intimate friends  
her slush, her hot radiance, she herself so gracefully 
awkward. And yet: the cradled baby wide-eyed in the wind.

Elizabeth Shippen Green:
From the age of eight, not doodling but illustrating
her school notebooks, she got her whole education, she’d say, 
lounging that one summer on the Bryn Mawr college lawn,
breathing in the knowledge the college girls discarded.
Girl on horseback, Girl on sailboat: she saw those students
in their long skirts learning to be sturdy, saw grown women
potting, pruning, stitching, thinking, researching, but painted them 
with such ease you’d say they merely sailed from pose
to graceful pose, the folds of each massive skirt not so much weight 
as wing. All wedded, and yet: How can she love anyone more than she
loves us?

Violet Oakley:
If ever deprived of paint, she’d say, she could sketch 
using only her tongue on the roof of her mouth. Painting
in tongues: she saw herself as Penn’s one true disciple,
saw it as her calling to elevate all to civic righteousness,
saw Penn tipping to her his hat, saw Unity – that massy sister –
as his keystone, though was herself not always brotherly 
or sisterly – intolerant, insistent, inhuman, spendthrift
with friendship as with cash, volcanic, opaque
even to herself, that small child inside, and yet:
it’s just four sonnets, she’d say, from the house to the meadow.

Nathalie Anderson
Rutledge