Selected Letters of Anna Heyward Taylor:  South Carolina Artist and World Traveler

edited by Edmund R. Taylor and Alexander Moore

The University of South Carolina Press, November 2010, hardcover, 360 pages, 79 illustrations, ISBN: 978-1-57003-945-4, list price $39.95.

Reviewed by Davyd Foard Hood

Beginning in the eighteenth century with Mark Catesby and Georg D. Ehret, artists have produced images of the genus Magnolia that have become icons of their era. Magnolia virginiana, identified as the "Sweet Flowering Bay," appears in Catesby's watercolors of the Blue Gross-beak, a pairing of the Painted Finch and Blue Linnet, and alone, in bloom with the foliage of Magnolia acuminata, in another work. His magnificent Magnolia grandiflora was adopted for the masthead of our newsletter in 1984 and first appeared on the Fall issue for that year.

Martin Johnson Heade's celebration of the Magnolia grandiflora came late in his career. Heade (1819-1904) first executed plant portraits of apple blossoms in the 1860s, and in the 1870s he produced dazzling orchids, most often with hummingbirds, based on the experience of three trips to Latin America. In March 1883 Martin Johnson Heade settled in St. Augustine, Florida, and began painting both Cherokee roses and Magnolias. Composed branches of Magnolia grandiflora, in bloom and bud, were placed against velvet, like precious gems in a jeweler's establishment.

Anna Heyward Taylor (1879-1956), the Columbia-born South Carolina artist who achieved fame as a member of the Charleston Renaissance, knew the work of both Mark Catesby and Martin Johnson Heade. By 1929, when she moved permanently to Charleston, Miss Taylor's talents had been honed by study, travel, and experience. Her Presbyterian schooling was broadened by study at the New York School of Art, the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase in summer painting tours in the Netherlands in 1903 and in London in 1904. There she met John Singer Sargent and marveled in James A. M. Whistler's Peacock Room. The weeks in London introduced her to Japonism and the arts of the East that prompted a trip, a decade later, to Japan, which deepened her interest in printmaking. In 1916 she studied woodblock printing in Provincetown and learned the process of "white-line printing that allowed an artist to make multi-colored prints from a single carved block."

Like Martin Johnson she was attracted to South America and in 1916 and 1920 she traveled to British Guiana with William Beebe, a scientist-explorer. On the first trip she was employed as a scientific illustrator on Mr. Beebe's staff; on the second trip she was an unpaid volunteer, a status that allowed her to undertake both scientific illustrations and watercolors, drawings, and gouaches of the native flora and fauna that would reappear in finished works throughout her career. On 17 January 1921, soon after her return to the United States, the Christian Science Monitor published "British Guiana Flowers" in which she described the particular combination of scientific observation and artistic creativity that would characterize her work for the next quarter-century.

Edmund R. Taylor, her nephew, and his co-author, Alexander Moore, recall these events and her other travels in an excellent biographical sketch in the opening pages of Selected Letters of Anna Heyward Taylor: South Carolina Artist and World Traveler. It precedes a series of letters to friends and family, and mainly to her sister "Nell," Ellen Elmore Taylor, and others from friends and colleagues, including William Merritt Chase, to her. The illustrations comprise photographs, many black and white woodblock prints, and thirty-four color reproductions of her work including both "Magnolia Grandiflora" and "Macrophylla," and affecting images of Charleston's flower and vegetable sellers.