Prentiss Taylor

Prentiss Taylor (December 13, 1907 – October 7, 1991) was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter.

Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City.

He was born on December 13, 1907, to John Eastlack Taylor and Beatrice Hottel.

In high school, Prentiss graduated from McKinley "Tech" High School, where he had studied art under Mary P. Shipman, Alexis Manny and Charles Lamb.

Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s.

This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance.

Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.

Taylor's work is in the collection of numerous institutions such as: the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art; The Phillips Collection; Gibbes Museum of Art; Museum of New Mexico; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art Fisk University Galleries and Greenville County Museum of Art.

In the 1920s, Taylor studied painting with Charles W. Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but turned to lithography in the late 1920s to early 1930s during his enrollment at the Art Students League in New York City.

He received further training in that medium at the George C. Miller workshop in New York.

During this period, he also designed costumes for the American-Oriental Revue, as well as designed scenery for plays at the Arts Club of Washington.

Prentiss established the Washington Wheat Press as a means for publishing, and within the paper were various poems and illustrations by the artist as well as poems and prose by Josiah Titzell, Rachel Field and Laura Benet.

He graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1925.

In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League.

He became a member of one of the most important printmaking societies in America at that time, the Society of American Graphic Artists.

After Taylor discovered lithographing in 1931, he worked primarily in the printmaking medium for the rest of his life, experimenting with various techniques and compositions and ultimately achieving a status as one this country's great lithographers.

During this time he became a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists.

Taylor depicted mostly realistic and narrative scenes of subjects and themes that reflected his personal interests in music, architecture, religion and social justice.

Hughes and Taylor joined together towards the end of 1931 to create the Golden Stair Press, issuing broadsides and books with illustrations by Taylor and texts by Hughes reflecting the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance.

Among their joint publications are The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations and the Scottsboro Limited.

In 1931, in Depression-plagued Alabama, nine black youths were falsely accused of rape by two white women.

The court trials became known as the Scottsboro case, and the black youths as "the Scottsboro boys."

By the end of that year Langston Hughes had written a play about the injustice, and the following year he added four poems to his play to make a booklet.

He asked his friend, the white artist Prentiss Taylor, to illustrate the poems.

The four lithographs in this exhibition are the product of that collaboration.

At age twenty, Taylor met Charleston novelist Josephine Pinckney at the MacDowell artists' colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Their new friendship prompted Taylor to visit Charleston, South Carolina, in 1933, because Pinckney asked friends to loan Taylor the Pink House.

(book-southern life) Prentiss stated "I arrived on the Clyde-Mallory Line Steamer about the end of May 1933…I was lent the Pink House on Chalmers Street and I was able to stay until Labor Day. I spent most of my time sketching, up one side of the street and down the other."

Taylor returned to the city in 1934 under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a predecessor to the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project.

Taylor took a few photos of Zora Neale Hurston at parties in New York City, notably "The Crow Dance" in 1935.

Most of Hurston's other photos were taken by Carl Van Vechten.

Carl Van Vechten took several portraits of Prentiss and some of which are in the Prentiss Taylor Papers archives.

Van Vechten is more closely tied with Langston Hughes, but Prentiss is colleagues by association.

In Taylor's diaries during the time of him working as an art therapist, he had several meetings with Ezra Pound, and his wife and son.

Pound was surprised to find an intellectual in Taylor, with whom he could discuss literature and art.

In 1990, Taylor had his last exhibition while still alive at Georgetown University in their Lauinger Library called "The Art of Prentiss Taylor", which included lithographs, watercolor paintings and book jacket designs.

In 1991, Taylor's health began deteriorating.

In April (age 83), he was put in a nursing home and was hospitalized in September for pneumonia and a heart infection.

Taylor died on October 7, 1991.

During his time in New York, Taylor developed a bond with poet Langston Hughes and writer Carl Van Vechten.