Albert Chevallier Tayler (1862–1925) was an English artist who specialised in portrait and genre painting, but was also involved in the plein air methods of the Newlyn School. He studied at Heatherley's School of Art, Royal Academy Schools and with avant-garde painters in Paris. He was educated at Bloxham School in Oxfordshire.
He is most known for his twelve-year involvement with the Newlyn School of painting. The Newlyn school was spawned after many international artists followed the En plein air school in France, whereby artists would leave Paris and take up rural life in small colonies of kindred painters. Thence, as artists returned from France to their own countries, they sought out remote locations to congregate and pursue the En plein air method. The Newlyn School is also known as British Impressionism.
A typical painting of this early period is A Dress Rehearsal (1888), hung in the National Museums Liverpool. This painting makes use of light and shadow and is based upon a genre scene as might have occurred in Cornwall. The Newlyn School drew their subjects from everyday life in the local area. Other associate artists of the Newlyn School were Henry Scott Tuke, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Stanhope Forbes, Leghe Suthers, Walter Langley and Elizabeth Armstrong.
During the 1890s he maintained connections with the art centre of London and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy; however, at about the turn of the century he moved to London and converted to a more genteel, urban lifestyle. Tayler began painting more grand scenes of the cities of Europe. In 1901 he painted one of his largest and most masterful works, The Ceremony of the Garter, depicting the famous late Middle Ages scene at Eltham Palace in which the fallen garter of Joan of Kent is picked up by King Edward III. This event circa 1348 led to Edward III founding the Order of the Garter.