Philadelphia’s ‘great masterpieces; find a new home in Woodmere Art Museum’s Frances M. Maguire Hall

Woodmere Art Museum director and CEO William R. Valerio never thought he’d be standing in a former second-floor bedroom turned into a cozy, copper-hued art gallery, admiring Violet Oakley’s famous series of paintings: Building the House of Wisdom.

Yet, there he was.

Two weeks before the new Frances M. Maguire Hall for Art and Education opens on Nov. 1, Valerio was brimming with excitement.

The Victorian mansion and former convent is the new home to the 112-year-old Chestnut Hill museum’s permanent collection, the most definitive group of paintings, sculptures, and prints by Philadelphia artists in the region — if not the world.

“I’ve been at the museum for 15 years and I’ve always wanted to build a space to show House of Wisdom the way Oakley intended it to be shown,” Valerio said. “But I never could have imagined this.”

This is a four-story, 17,000-square-foot, gleaming house museum.

The Violet Oakley Gallery is particularly noteworthy. The 375-square-foot space is a recreation of early 20th-century banker Charlton Yarnall’s music room, where Oakley’s vibrant murals were nestled in the Rittenhouse Square mansion’s vaulted ceilings.

At Maguire Hall, Oakley’s allegorical interpretations of wisdom in the arts and sciences are fixed in lunettes positioned at eye level, allowing museumgoers to sit in a meditative gaze under a glowing replica of Italian designer Nicola d’Ascenzo’s stained glass dome.

Oakley’s House of Wisdom has been on and off view at Woodmere since 1962, when the museum’s then director — and Oakley’s life partner — Edith Emerson brought the 12-piece series to the museum. Yarnall’s mansion was being converted to an office building, and Emerson feared her late partner’s seminal work would be carelessly discarded.

“The House of Wisdom is among the roughly 11,000 pieces of art we’ve acquired over the decades that now have a place to shine like never before,“ Valerio said.

Charles Knox Smith opened the Woodmere Museum — what is now the museum’s Charles Knox Smith Hall — in 1913. It holds Woodmere’s vast 18th- and 19th-century collections, including Smith’s beloved Philadelphia landscapes, and is open Wednesday to Sunday.

A few houses down and across the street, Maguire Hall’s 14 galleries hold paintings, sculptures, illustrations, photographs, and mixed media murals centering 20th-century Philadelphia artists.

“The idea is to show off Philadelphia’s great masterpieces,” Valerio said.

He and his four-person curatorial team spent months mounting golden frames on the monochromatic walls, so closely together they nearly touched. It gives Maguire Hall the intimate vibe of a 19th-century home.

Every major 20th-century art movement is represented, but the curation is a nod to 21st-century diversity.

African American realist Ellen Powell Tiberino’s striking nude Repose shares gallery space with Martha Mayer Erlebacher’s stunning life-size portrait The Path. Both are only a few feet away from a work by George Biddle — of the illustrious Philadelphia family that traces its roots to the 17th century — the thoughtful Evocation of the Past.

Black Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts scholar Charles Jay’s meticulous floral still life paintings from the early 1980s line Maguire Hall’s grand staircase. It leads to the second-floor galleries, where lauded 1920s impressionist Walter Elmer Schofield’s bucolic renderings of snowy Wissahickon trails coolly hang.

An entire gallery is dedicated to female artists, featuring portraits by Oakley and Emerson. They are in conversation with an arresting sculpture by Syd Carpenter, Frank as the Sun King, an homage to Carpenter’s brother, who served in Desert Storm and came home to Philadelphia as a quadriplegic. Carpenter curated the Colored Girls Museum’s Livingroom Garden in 2024.

“These diverse backgrounds and social experiences reshape and expand the canon of 20th-century art through a Philadelphia lens,” Valerio said.

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