Anna Heyward Taylor

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.

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. 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, where the Columbia Museum of Art was first located.

She was educated at the South Carolina College for Women, graduating in 1897. She traveled to Holland in 1903 to study with the painter William Merritt Chase, afterwards traveling around Europe for another few years as well as to China and Japan in 1914. During the latter part of World War I, she served eighteen months in the American Red Cross in France and Germany, 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 for graduate work and spent the summers of 1915 and 1916 in Provincetown, MA, 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.

As a mature artist, Taylor painted in both oils and watercolor but she preferred printmaking to either, 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 Matisse's work. She also worked occasionally in textiles such as batik-printed silk.

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