Selected letters of Anna Heyward Taylor

About this book

The highly skilled artworks of Anna Heyward Taylorùespecially her celebrated woodblock prints and watercolorsùare well known to students and collectors of southern art. However, Taylor was also a dedicated letter writer and persistent student of art. Edited by her descendant Edmund R. Taylor and Alexander Moore, this first publication of Taylor's letters provides a new dimension to the artist's life and works. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Taylor received professional art training from William Merritt Chase in New York and B.J.O. Nordfeldt in New England. In Japan she studied the works of the classical printmakers and developed an appreciation of textile arts. Drawn to roam abroad, Taylor traveled to the Far East before World. War I, served in the American Red Cross in wartime France and Germany, and visited Europe both before and after the Great War. She also made lengthy excursions to British Guiana, the Virgin Islands, and Mexico to study and create colorful works of art in several media: watercolors, woodblock prints, and textiles. She traveled to British Guiana in the capacity of scientific illustrator, and her correspondence and art from such excursions are emblematic of her well-informed interest in botany. Between the wars and amid her travels, Taylor worked and studied at the renowned artists' colony in Province-town, Massachusetts. In 1929 she settled in Charleston and became one of the key participants in the Charleston Renaissance. In the mid-1910's Taylor spent time at an artists' colony in Taxco, Mexico, fully immersed in the bohemian life among the artists, which she keenly describes with an anthropologist's eye. Wherever she traveled, lived, or worked, Taylor made her life a celebration of innovation, independence, and creativityùtraits that illuminate the vibrant character of her chronicles of exotic people, places, and events. --Book Jacket.