E.A. Taylor
In July 1898 Taylor went to work for Wylie & Lochhead,
a Glasgow firm of furniture makers, and became their chief designer
in the art furniture department in 1901. His furniture and interior
room designs were exhibited at the Glasgow International Exhibition
in 1901, and in Budapest and Turin in 1902.
In 1903 he was appointed as a part-time lecturer in
furniture design at the Glasgow School of Art, where his
fiancée, Jessie, was also teaching. He continued
his weekly lectures even after moving to Manchester in 1906 as the
designer/manager for George Wragge Ltd.. In Manchester, he was
particularly involved in design for stained glass window
commissions.
In September 1908, he and Jessie married, and after a
honeymoon in Arran, the couple set up home in Salford, near
Manchester, where their only child, Merle, was born in August, the
following year.
Artist and
Teacher
In April 1910, Taylor accepted a teaching post in a private
art school in Paris. It was an unhappy move, and in 1911 he and
Jessie set up their own school - The Shealing Atelier - at their
own home in the Montparnasse quarter of the
city.
In summer the Taylors also ran painting schools at High
Corrie, on Arran, using Jessie's house 'Greengate' in Kirkcudbright
as a staging post from Paris.
As well as teaching, Taylor also worked on designs for
stained glass commissions, and was appointed the Paris
correspondent of the influential London art journal - The
Studio.
The outbreak of the First World War, and
the consequent loss of students, prompted the Taylors to leave
Paris for Kirkcudbright .The art school was not revived after the
war, but Taylor kept on their Paris apartment for his visits for
The Studio.
The Public Figure
In 1921 a solo exhibition of Taylor's landscape paintings of
Arran and Kirkcudbright was held in Taylor and Brown's gallery in
Glasgow. The following year, he was one of the founding members of
the Dumfries and Galloway Fine Art Society.
Recognised as an authority on contemporary art in the 1920s
and 1930s, Taylor continued teaching through the Arran summer
school, and lecturing and writing on art topics for The Studio.
With his wife, Jessie M King, he was also involved in several
interior mural designs for Lanarkshire schools.
Locally he was regarded as a man of letters and a gifted
public speaker, carrying out engagements such as the opening of
Burns House in Dumfries in 1935.
The summer schools were not revived after
the Second World War, and Taylor's last years
were spent quietly in Kirkcudbright. Jessie M King died in 1949,
and in November 1951 Taylor suffered a heart attack, dying at the
age of 77.
