Twenty-three years before American women won the right to vote in national elections, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Violet Oakley established a unique communal household based on professional cooperation and personal affection. The three artists met in 1897 when they were all studying with Howard Pyle, the nation’s most celebrated illustrator. It was Pyle who noted a similarity in the work of Jessie Willcox Smith and Violet Oakley and recommended that they collaborate on a professional assignment. To expedite the project, Smith moved into Oakley’s studio in downtown Philadelphia. Elizabeth Shippen Green soon joined them.

When their careers began to flourish, the trio rented the Red Rose Inn, a romantic 200-acre suburban estate on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Faced with the daunting prospect of managing the property, they enlisted the help of their friend Henrietta Cozens, who had no artistic ambition but was eager to shoulder the domestic responsibilities. Nevertheless, the financial obligations of maintaining the household were considerable and necessitated a binding commitment. So the four women made a heartfelt promise to stay together forever. They adopted a common surname, christening themselves the Cogs family—C for Cozens, O for Oakley, G for Green, and S for Smith. Howard Pyle called them the Red Rose Girls.

Their unconventional alliance enabled Smith, Green, and Oakley to establish national reputations as artists, while maintaining both the punishing work schedule necessary in a competitive field and the genteel lifestyle that in the early twentieth century was the hallmark of a successful woman. The three artists collaborated on projects, criticized and encouraged one another, and were freed from distracting domestic responsibilities by Henrietta Cozens’s able management of the property.

In a career dominated by men who painted marauding pirates, clashing knights, and gritty western subjects, Jessie Willcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green’s lyrical illustrations of idyllic family life captivated readers of illustrated books and popular periodicals, including Scribners, Colliers, and Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Violet Oakley was no less successful and became internationally known as a painter and muralist.

The alliance between the Red Rose Girls lasted for fourteen years, flourishing in an atmosphere of cooperation, collaboration, and love, until a proposal of marriage forced Elizabeth Shippen Green to make a painful choice. When she left the household, it caused a breach that never fully mended. Although all three artists continued to be productive, after the breakup of their household, their work did not so much decline as fail to move forward. Although they all lived well into the twentieth century, they never cut their hair, shortened their skirts, learned to drive, or embraced the sweeping artistic changes that characterized the new century. They had no sympathy for the candor of modernism and remained romantics looking back with longing to the heady days when in love with life, art, and one another, they were the Red Rose Girls.