Anna Heyward Taylor

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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. [1] [2]

Charleston Renaissance

The Charleston Renaissance is a period between World Wars I and II in which the city of Charleston, South Carolina, experienced a boom in the arts as artists, writers, architects, and historical preservationists came together to improve and represent their city. The Charleston Renaissance was related to the larger interwar artistic movement known as the Southern Renaissance and is credited with helping to spur the city's tourist industry.

Contents

Early life and education

Anna Heyward Taylor was born November 13, 1879, in Columbia, South Carolina, 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—and Marianna (Heyward) Taylor. [3] The Taylor family was prominent in the cotton industry and in the development of the city of Columbia. [4] Her older brother Thomas Taylor would later build Taylor House, which became the first location of the Columbia Museum of Art.

Columbia, South Carolina Capital of South Carolina

Columbia is the capital and second largest city of the U.S. state of South Carolina, with a population estimate of 134,309 as of 2016. The city serves as the county seat of Richland County, and a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. It is the center of the Columbia metropolitan statistical area, which had a population of 767,598 as of the 2010 United States Census, growing to 817,488 by July 1, 2016, according to 2015 U.S. Census estimates. The name Columbia is a poetic term used for the United States, originating from the name of Christopher Columbus.

Army of Northern Virginia field army of the Confederate States Army

The Army of Northern Virginia was the primary military force of the Confederate States of America 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 against the Union Army of the Potomac.

Taylor House (Columbia, South Carolina)

Taylor House, also known as the former home of the Columbia Museum of Art, is a historic home located at Columbia, South Carolina. It designed by the architectural firm of Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul and built in 1908, as a two-story, "L"-shaped, brick Neo-Classical style mansion. The front facade features a projecting portico supported by large, fluted limestone Corinthian order columns. It was built for Thomas Taylor, Jr., who served as president of Taylor Manufacturing Company. In 1950, the Columbia Museum of Art converted the house for use as a museum. The museum added three wings. The original stables are joined to the main house by the Science Museum wing.

Taylor received education at the South Carolina College for Women, graduating in 1897. [4] 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. [4] Taylor served eighteen months in the American Red Cross in France and Germany during World War I, spending most of the years 1917–19 in France. [5] She was the first woman from South Carolina to serve with the Red Cross in France during the war. [6]

William Merritt Chase American painter

William Merritt Chase was an American painter, known as an exponent of Impressionism and as a teacher. He is also responsible for establishing the Chase School, which later would become Parsons School of Design.

World War I 1914–1918 global war originating in Europe

World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.

On her return to America, Taylor went to Radcliffe College 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. [1] [4] 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. [7] 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.

Radcliffe College former womens college in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges, among which it shared with Bryn Mawr College, Wellesley College, Smith College, and others the popular reputation of having a particularly intellectual, literary, and independent-minded female student body. Radcliffe conferred Radcliffe College diplomas to undergraduates and graduate students for the first 70 or so years of its history and then joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas to undergraduates beginning in 1963. A formal "non-merger merger" agreement with Harvard was signed in 1977, with full integration with Harvard completed in 1999. Today, within Harvard University, Radcliffe's former administrative campus is home to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and former Radcliffe housing at the Radcliffe Quadrangle has been incorporated into the Harvard College house system. Under the terms of the 1999 consolidation, the Radcliffe Yard and the Radcliffe Quadrangle retain the "Radcliffe" designation in perpetuity.

Career

As a mature artist, Taylor painted in both oils and watercolor, but she preferred printmaking, especially woodcuts and linocuts. 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 prints by artists such as William S. Rice, as well as some of Henri Matisse's work. [7] She also worked occasionally in textiles such as batik-printed silk. [1]

Linocut is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum surface with a sharp knife, V-shaped chisel or gouge, with the raised (uncarved) areas representing a reversal of the parts to show printed. The linoleum sheet is inked with a roller, and then impressed onto paper or fabric. The actual printing can be done by hand or with a printing press.

William S. Rice American artist

William Seltzer Rice was an American woodblock print artist, art educator and author, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Northern California.

Henri Matisse French artist

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

In 1916, Taylor accompanied William Beebe's expedition to British Guiana as a scientific illustrator, and she returned again with Beebe in 1920. [6] On both trips, she made botanical studies that greatly influenced her work and that she later translated into prints and batik textiles. [1] [5] For some of these works, her designs drew not just on visible plant parts but also on microscopic sections of stems, ovaries, etc. [8] 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. [8] [9]

William Beebe American ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, and explorer

CharlesWilliam Beebe was an American naturalist, ornithologist, marine biologist, entomologist, explorer, and author. He is remembered for the numerous expeditions he conducted for the New York Zoological Society, his deep dives in the Bathysphere, and his prolific scientific writing for academic and popular audiences.

British Guiana British posession in the Guianas region between 1814–1966

British Guiana was the name of the British colony, part of the British West Indies (Caribbean), on the northern coast of South America, now known as the independent nation of Guyana.

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. [4] She lived at 79 Church Street and opened a studio on Atlantic Street, where several other leaders of the Charleston Renaissance also had studios. [7] 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, Mexico. [5]

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. [1] [5] [10] 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. [7] 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. [1]

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. [1] [2] 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 Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and other institutions. [4] 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. [11] Her letters and other papers are in the collection of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. [5]

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "The Charleston Renaissance". Florence County Museum website. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2016.
  2. 1 2 "The Charleston Renaissance". Morris Museum of Art website. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2016.
  3. ↑ South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, vol. 8, p.112.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Taylor, Anna". The Johnson Collection website. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Selected Letters of Anna Heyward Taylor". University of South Carolina Press website. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2016.
  6. 1 2 "Anna Heyward Taylor—Batiks & World War I Red Cross Uniform". The Charleston Museum (blog). Retrieved Jan. 26, 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Severens, Martha R. "To Sell the City of Charleston: The Visual Arts and the Charleston Renaissance." In James M. Hutchisson and Harlan Greene, eds. Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 1900–1940. University of Georgia Press, 2003, pp. 35–46.
  8. 1 2 Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, vols. 10–12, pp. 61, 106.
  9. ↑ Magazine of Art, vol. 13, p. 173.
  10. ↑ "Charleston Renaissance". Greenville County Museum of Art website. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2016.
  11. ↑ Prioleau, Horry Frost, and Edward Lining Manigault. Register of Carolina Huguenots. Vol. 1 (Bacot–Dupont), p. 532.

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