Harvesting Rice

Anna Heyward Taylor was a world traveler. As a student she spent summers in Holland and London. She went to Japan and was an ambulance driver in France during World War I. The summer of 1916 she was in Provincetown, Massachusetts, followed by a four-month expedition to British Guiana. In the 1930s she spent eighteen months in Mexico. But beginning in 1929, she made Charleston her home.

A watercolorist and textile designer, Taylor is remembered most for her prints. Twenty linoleum block prints (also called linocuts) were used as illustrations for This Our Land, a book about South Carolina agriculture. In Harvesting Rice, Taylor used curving outlines and rhythmic rice stalks to create a dynamic image, enhanced by the contrast of white and black.