Charleston Renaissance: Anna Heyward Taylor

Anna Heyward Taylor was one of the leading artists of the Charleston Renaissance, with artwork that showcased her distinctive style influenced by her extensive travels. Born in Columbia, SC in 1879, she came from a prominent cotton-growing family and enjoyed a comfortable upbringing and well-rounded education. She graduated from the South Carolina College for Women in 1897, and spent much of the next twenty years traveling and developing her artistic style. 

Taylor moved to New York and studied with painter William Merrit Chase (whose school would later become the Parsons School of Design), later traveling with her mentor to Holland to study European art. She became especially interested in the contemporary trend of Japonism, the influence of Japanese art on European art and decoration and a precursor to Art Nouveau styles. Upon the deaths of her parents, Taylor returned to the United States and accepted a teaching position in Columbia at her alma mater. She took periodic breaks for travel, spending time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she learned printmaking with a local artist group. Later she traveled again to Europe; in 1914 she visited China, Japan, and Korea; and in 1916 she joined William Beebe on an expedition to British Guiana. During World War I, she joined the American Red Cross and was sent to France and Germany to serve as a nurse.  

After the war, Taylor returned to the United States and continued working in various media. While she was proficient at oil and watercolor paintings and experimented with textile arts such as batik-printed silk, she preferred printmaking and was especially interested in woodcut and linocut printing techniques, and these are the works for which she is best known. She produced an extensive body of print work, often in stark black and white or bright colors, with flattened perspectives, bold lines, and natural motifs which embody the influence of Japanese art on her own style. 

In 1920, Taylor returned with William Beebe to British Guiana (today Guyana) on an expedition as a scientific illustrator cataloging tropical plants and animals. The work she created on this journey not only showed the visible parts of the plants, but also included illustrations of microscopic plant parts. These illustrations were shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York and at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and inspired later decorative works of art, especially textile prints. Taylor spent the remainder of the 1920s in New York, and moved to Charleston at the end of the decade. 

In Charleston, Taylor lived at 79 Church St, where she was neighbors with Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and other artists of the Charleston Renaissance. Here, her work focused on printmaking and she became known for her bold, graphic scenes of the South Carolina lowcountry. This included colorful illustrations of the birds and flowers of the region, as well as stark black-and-white prints of life in and around Charleston’s urban center and agricultural surroundings. An illustration depicting African American women harvesting rice was chosen in 1939 to represent the city at the New York World’s Fair, and in the 1940s she provided illustrations for This Our Land: The Story of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina by Chalmers Swinton Murray - a book which described a rather euphemistic and romanticized account of the agricultural history of South Carolina. 

In 1950, Taylor was represented in the first solo exhibition at the new Columbia Museum of Art, which was located in the former home of her brother, Thomas Taylor. More than 40 pieces of her work were shown here before being moved to the Gibbes Art Gallery (now the Gibbes Museum) in Charleston. She died in 1956. Today, her artwork is held in private collections and institutions such as the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

More South Carolina Artists:

Alfred Hutty | Alice Ravenel Huger Smith | Elizabeth O’Neill Verner | Ned Jennings | William Halsey | Jasper Johns | Merton Simpson