Ernest Archibald Taylor

1874 - 1951

Born in London and educated in Surrey and Paris, George Adolphus Storey worked briefly for an architect and for a sculptor before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1854. As a yClosely associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Glasgow Style, Ernest Archibald Taylor was from Greenock, the fifteenth of seventeen children of an army major, and was apprenticed in the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde. He got the opportunity to train at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met and married Jessie M. King, later moving to Salford, where Taylor worked for George Wragg Ltd., producing designs for stained glass windows. He also became a leading designer of Arts and Crafts furniture, as well as a painter in oils and watercolour. Taylor and King moved to Paris in 1914, setting up an art school, the Shearling Atelier, later returning to Kirkudbright and running a summer school on the Isle of Arran. The influence of French art, as well as the Scottish Colourists, is apparent in Taylor's work from this time onwards.