Edith Granger-Taylor:
Self-portrait, c.1920
Framed (ref: 10569)
Pastel on paper

Tags: Edith Granger-Taylor pastel portraits women 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

Provenance: The Artist's Grandson

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.257.

Granger-Taylor exhibited numerously in the 1920s and 1930s, including at the NEAC, the RE exhibition in 1935, and with solo shows at the Grosvenor Galleries (1922) and the Beaux Arts Gallery (1932). She worked almost exclusively in pastel or crayon. Reporting on her 1932 exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, the art critic from The Scotsman wrote that Granger-Taylor uses pastel with ‘extraordinary facility and intelligence, and designs with grace. She has a style personal and fluent (...), full of pleasant flourishes and tricks of technique’. The writer goes on to praise the tone and shape of Granger-Taylor’s near-abstract style, saying that the ‘peculiar sweetness (of pastel) proves fatal to all but draughtsmen with a strong and healthy colour sense’. 

In spite of such critical reception, her increasing frustration as a female artist working in the inter-war years, showcased in paintings such as Allegory (1934) (which she referred to as a “delicate feminist satire”) caused Granger-Taylor to retreat from the art world, and after the 1930s her work would not be exhibited again in her lifetime.