Frank Walter Taylor

Background

He was born in Philadelphia, Pa. , in 1874, the son of Frank Hamilton and Margaret (Johnston) Taylor. His father was an artist well known for drawings of old Philadelphia.

Education

Taylor attended Friends' School and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he won a traveling scholarship in 1896 that enabled him to visit the principal art centers of Europe and, for a time, to settle in Paris, where he studied independently.

Career

In 1898 he opened his own studio in Philadelphia. Desiring to paint, he was, nevertheless, thrown into illustration as a ready means to earn a livelihood.

During a long association with Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904-08, he illustrated Scribner books, and articles, stories, and poems for Scribner's Magazine. Especially noteworthy were his pictures for a special edition (1905) of Henry Van Dyke's Fisherman's Luck, Mary R. S. Andrews' The Perfect Tribute (1906), F. Hopkinson Smith's The Veiled Lady (1907), and Mary A. K. Waddington's Château and Country Life in France (1908). He also contributed illustrations to numerous popular magazines.

For a time he was instructor in illustration at the Art Students' League, New York, and at the School of Design for Women, Philadelphia. In 1921 he was appointed instructor in illustration at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

His work includes many sketches of out-of-the-way places, the result of his annual trips abroad, as well as a series of sketches of the Thames. He was especially fond of France, and an admirer of Gaston La Touche and Pierre Auguste Renoir. He also produced portraits in oil and in charcoal, chiefly of artists, whom he preferred as subjects. Among his sitters were Joseph Pennell; John McLure Hamilton, the painter; George Arliss and Otis Skinner, actors; and R. Tait McKenzie, the sculptor. During the World War he was one of a group of Philadelphia artists who gave their services to aid government loan campaigns.

Shortly before his death he contemplated a different type of illustrating, and was engaged on preliminary sketches for new editions of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He also devoted more time to portraiture and to pictorial rendering of constructive drawings for architects. Among his last works was a series of nudes in chalk and charcoal.

He died in Ogdensburg, N. Y.

Achievements

• He contributed to international exhibitions in Rome, London, and Paris as well as in America, and in 1915 he won the special gold medal of honor for illustration at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, where he exhibited illustrations and charcoal portraits. His draftsmanship was distinguished, and his drawings had a velvety richness that was the result of his mastery of the charcoal medium. His friend Joseph Pennell described him as "the last of the American illustrators. " He is represented in the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the University of Nebraska, the Rhode Island School of Design, the New York Public Library, the Society of Illustrators, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

Connections

He married Elsie Carleton Megary on April 19, 1917. There were no children.

Father:

Frank Hamilton

Mother:

Margaret (Johnston) Taylor

Spouse:

Elsie Carleton Megary