Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/354

Rh in New York, where she studied at the Art Students' League under Carroll Beckwith. Pupil of Collin and Araan-Jean in Paris and Charles Lasar in England; also in Philadelphia of Joseph de Camp, Henry Thouron, Cecilia Beaux, and Howard Pyle.

Miss Oakley has executed mural decorations, a mosaic reredos, and five stained-glass windows in the Church of All Saints, New York City, and a window in the Convent of the Holy Child, at Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania.

In the summer of 1903 she was commissioned to decorate the walls of the Governor's reception room in the new Capitol at Harrisburg. Before engaging in this work—the first of its kind to be confided to an American woman — Miss Oakley went to Italy to study mural painting. She then went to England to thoroughly inform herself concerning the historical foundation of her subject, the history of the earliest days of Pennsylvania. At Oxford and in London she found what she required, and on her return to America established herself in a studio in Villa Nova, Pennsylvania, to make her designs for "The Romance of the Founding of the State," which is to be painted on a frieze five feet deep. The room is seventy by thirty feet, and sixteen feet in height.

The decoration of this Capitol is to be more elaborate and costly than that of any other public edifice in the United States. In mural decoration Miss Oakley will be associated with Edwin A. Abbey, but the Governor's room is to be her work entirely, and will doubtless occupy her during several years.

Mr Charles A. Caffin, in his article upon the exhibition