Anna Heyward Taylor facts for kids

Anna Heyward Taylor (born November 13, 1879 – died March 4, 1956) was a talented American artist. She was known for her paintings and prints, and she was a very important artist during a time called the Charleston Renaissance.

Anna's Early Life and Schooling

Anna Heyward Taylor was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1879. She was one of eight children! Her family was well-known in the cotton business. Her older brother, Thomas, even built a house that later became the first Columbia Museum of Art.

Anna went to college at the South Carolina College for Women and graduated in 1897. She loved to travel and learn! In 1903, she went to Holland to study painting with a famous artist named William Merritt Chase. She then traveled around Europe for a few years. Later, in 1914, she visited China and Japan.

During World War I, Anna helped the American Red Cross in France and Germany for about 18 months. She was the first woman from South Carolina to serve with the Red Cross in France during the war.

When she returned to America, Anna studied at Radcliffe College. She also spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, learning printmaking. There, she became very good at a special technique called white-line woodblock printing. This method lets artists print many colors from just one wood block, which is pretty clever!

Anna's Art Career

As an adult artist, Anna Taylor painted with oils and watercolors. But she really loved making prints, especially woodcuts and linocuts. Her art often had strong lines and bold colors, or sometimes stark black and white. Her style showed influences from modern art and her travels in Asia. Her prints sometimes looked like the Arts and Crafts movement art or even some works by Henri Matisse. She also worked with textiles, like making batik designs on silk.

Exploring Nature Through Art

In 1916, Anna joined a science trip to British Guiana with a scientist named William Beebe. She went along as a scientific illustrator, drawing plants and animals. She went back with Beebe again in 1920. On these trips, she made many detailed studies of plants. These studies greatly influenced her later prints and batik textiles. For some of her art, she even used drawings of tiny parts of plants that you can only see under a microscope! These unique artworks were shown in museums in New York in 1922. It might have been the first time microscopic plant details were used in decorative art.

Life in Charleston

Anna moved to New York City in 1920 and stayed there for about ten years. Then, she moved back to South Carolina and settled in Charleston. She opened an art studio on Atlantic Street, where other important artists of the Charleston Renaissance also had studios. Even though she became closely connected to Charleston's art scene, she still traveled sometimes. For example, in the 1930s, she spent time in an artist's colony in Taxco, Mexico.

In Charleston, Anna became famous for her prints that showed life in the South Carolina Lowcountry. She drew scenes of farming, local animals and plants, buildings, street views, and people working in the city. One of her prints, Harvesting Rice (around 1930), showed African-American women harvesting rice. This print was one of five artworks chosen to represent Charleston at the 1939 New York World's Fair! In 1949, she also illustrated a book about the history of farming in South Carolina.

Today, Anna Heyward Taylor is considered one of the four main artists of the Charleston Renaissance. The other three are Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, and Alfred Hutty.

Where to See Her Art

Anna's artworks can be found in many museums, including:

• 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

In 2010, a collection of her letters was published. It was called Selected Letters of Anna Heyward Taylor, South Carolina Artist and World Traveler.

Anna Heyward Taylor passed away on March 4, 1956. Her letters and other papers are kept at the University of South Carolina.

See also

• Provincetown Printers, an art colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts