Anna Heyward Taylor (November 13, 1879 – March 4, 1956) was a painter and printmaker who is considered one of the leading artists of the Charleston Renaissance.

Early life and education

Anna Heyward Taylor was born November 13, 1879, in

Columbia, South Carolina Columbia is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is List of municipalities in South Carolina, the second-mo ...

, one of eight children of Benjamin Walter Taylor—a physician and surgeon who had served in the Civil War in the

Army of Northern Virginia The Army of Northern Virginia was a field army of the Confederate States Army in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War. It was also the primary command structure of the Department of Northern Virginia. It was most often arrayed agains ...

—and Marianna (Heyward) Taylor. The Taylor family was prominent in the cotton industry and in the development of the city of Columbia. Her older brother Thomas Taylor would later build Taylor House, which became the first location of the Columbia Museum of Art. Taylor received education at the South Carolina College for Women, graduating in 1897. She traveled to Holland in 1903 to study with the painter William Merritt Chase, afterward traveling around Europe for another few years as well as to China and Japan in 1914. Taylor served eighteen months in the American Red Cross in France and Germany during

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, spending most of the years 1917–19 in France. She was the first woman from South Carolina to serve with the Red Cross in France during the war. On her return to America, Taylor went to

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a Women's colleges in the United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard Colle ...

for graduate work and spent the summers of 1915 and 1916 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, studying printmaking with B.J.O. Nordfeldt at the Provincetown Print workshop. There she became expert in a technique she would often use, white-line woodblock printing, in which most of the print is a solid color with the image formed by white (uninked) lines. This technique makes it possible for an artist to print multiple colors from the same block rather than requiring a separate block for each color.

Career

As a mature artist, Taylor painted in both oils and watercolor, but she preferred printmaking, especially

woodcuts Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with Chisel#Gouge, gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts ...

and

linocut Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of relief printing in which a sheet of linoleum (sometimes mounted on a wooden block) is used for a relief printing, relief surface. A design i ...

s. Her style is pictorial with strong graphic lines showing the influence of both modernism and her travels in Asia. Her images were generally printed either in bold colors or in stark black-and-white. With flattened perspective, large areas of color, and limited details, Taylor's prints have echoes of

Arts and Crafts The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the Decorative arts, decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and ...

prints by artists such as William S. Rice, as well as some of

Henri Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual arts, visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, ...

's work. She also worked occasionally in textiles such as

batik Batik is a dyeing technique using wax Resist dyeing, resist. The term is also used to describe patterned textiles created with that technique. Batik is made by drawing or stamping wax on a cloth to prevent colour absorption during the dyein ...

-printed silk. In 1916, Taylor accompanied William Beebe's expedition to

British Guiana British Guiana was a British colony, part of the mainland British West Indies. It was located on the northern coast of South America. Since 1966 it has been known as the independent nation of Guyana. The first known Europeans to encounter Guia ...

as a scientific illustrator, and she returned again with Beebe in 1920. On both trips, she made botanical studies that greatly influenced her work and that she later translated into prints and batik textiles. For some of these works, her designs drew not just on visible plant parts but also on microscopic sections of stems, ovaries, etc. They were shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York and at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in 1922, and they may represent the first time that microscopic details of plants were used in decorative art. Taylor moved to New York City in 1920, remaining there until the end of the decade, when she returned to South Carolina, settling in Charleston. She lived at 79 Church Street and opened a studio on Atlantic Street, where several other leaders of the Charleston Renaissance also had studios. Although she thereafter became closely associated with Charleston's art scene, she continued to travel at intervals; for example spending time in the 1930s in an artist's colony in

Taxco Taxco de Alarcón (; usually referred to as simply Taxco) is a small city and administrative center of Taxco de Alarcón Municipality located in the Mexico, Mexican state of Guerrero. Taxco is located in the north-central part of the state, from ...

, Mexico. In Charleston, Taylor became known for her prints illustrating life in the South Carolina Lowcountry, including agricultural subjects both past and present, local fauna and flora, architecture, street scenes, and the city's tradespeople. A print of African-American women harvesting rice (''Harvesting Rice'', ca. 1930) was one of five works chosen to represent the city at the

1939 New York World's Fair The 1939 New York World's Fair (also known as the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair) was an world's fair, international exposition at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York City, New York, United States. The fair included exhibitio ...

. In 1949, she illustrated a book by Chalmers Swinton Murray entitled ''This Our Land: The Story of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina'', which provided a picturesque account of aspects of the state's agricultural history. Along with Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, and Alfred Hutty, Taylor is today considered one of the four leading artists of the Charleston Renaissance. Her works are in the collections of the Columbia Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconn ...

, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and other institutions. In 2010 her nephew, Dr. Edmund Rhett Taylor, along with Alexander Moore, had a collection of her letters published by the University of South Carolina Press - ''Selected Letters of Anna Heyward Taylor, South Carolina Artist and World Traveler''. Taylor died March 4, 1956. Her letters and other papers are in the collection of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.

References

External links

Finding aid to Anna Heyward Taylor papers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Anna Heyward 1879 births 1956 deaths Charleston Renaissance American women artists American women printmakers American women painters People from Columbia, South Carolina Artists from South Carolina American botanical illustrators

Early life and education

Career

See also

References

Further reading

External links