The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love., Elizabeth Shippen Green , and Violet Oakley

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 2004

The alliance among the Red Rose Girls lasted for 14 year's, flourishing in an atmosphere of cooperation, collaboration, and love, until a proposal of marriage forced 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 their work did not so much decline as fail to move forward. Although they all lived well into the 20th century, they never cut their hair, shortened their skirts, learned to drive, or embraced the sweeping artistic changes that characterized the new era. 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.

"The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love" is a major retrospective of the artists' works and draws on more than 100 original oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, archival photographs, books and magazine tear sheets that tell a vibrant story of three extraordinary lives. Many of the paintings--on loan from public and private collections across the nation--rarely have been seen and some have never before been on public view. The exhibition can be seen at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass., through May 31.