Design

A Look into the Lives of Jessie M. King and E.A. Taylor

2 April 2025

John Mackie

This April's Design Since 1860 auction features a selection of works from the Estate of Merle Taylor. The pieces are a snapshot into the lives of Jessie M. King and Ernest Archibald Taylor and their family.

Jessie King was born at the manse in New Kilpatrick, Bearsden, near Glasgow, she was the daughter of James Watters King, a minister of the Church of Scotland, and Mary Anne Anderson. Raised in a strict religious household, she was discouraged from pursuing art, often hiding her school drawings from her mother. However, she persevered and studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1892 to 1899, later becoming a teacher there in book decoration.

DESIGN Since 1860

Explore our Wednesday 16 & Thursday 17 April auction.

King gained international recognition for her book illustrations and her creative talents extended to posters, bookplates, jewellery, ceramics, wallpaper, murals, textiles, and furniture. In 1908, she married fellow artist E. A. Taylor, a furniture and stained glass designer who also worked in oil and watercolours. Their only child, Merle Elspeth, was born in 1909.

In 1910, the family moved to Paris, where King and Taylor ran the Shealing Atelier, an art school and gallery. Summers were spent teaching on the Isle of Arran. With the outbreak of World War I, they returned to Scotland, settling in Kirkcudbright, where King established Green Gate Close, a centre for women artists. She pioneered the batik technique in Scotland, designing scarves sold by Liberty’s. King also collaborated with Taylor on furniture and interior design projects. Taylor contributed to “The Studio” magazine as a Paris correspondent and continued to paint landscapes and lecture on art. ⁠

A highlight in the collection, Jessie M King’s How Four Queens Found Sir Lancelot in the Wood, was executed around the time King and Taylor were living in France and running the Shearing Atelier School of Art. It can be argued that some of her finest works belong to this Paris period, including pieces considered influential to the creation of the Art Deco movement.

‘HOW FOUR QUEENS FOUND SIR LANCELOT IN THE WOOD’, CIRCA 1910

coloured silks, framed

20.5cm x 41cm (frame size 48cm x 65.5cm)

£5,000 - £7,000 + fees

The embroidery employs striking design and skilful execution to illustrate a beguiling legend. Most intriguing of all however, is the artistic partnership behind its creation, a piece of the puzzle so often extinguished from the history of decorative art.

This work marked the genesis of a collaboration between King and Paris based embroiderer Madame Elise Prioleau. Despite her French sounding name, Prioleau was descended from an ancient English family and married to a banker from South Carolina. Prior to King’s move to France, Prioleau had contacted the artist via letter. A feeling was present amongst artistic circles that contemporary embroidery lacked imaginative input and was instead producing ‘insipid and meaningless’ works, a fault of the designers rather than the embroiderers. This was a sentiment with which Prioleau agreed, hence why, on seeing King’s inspired illustrations in the Studio magazine, she suggested collaboration.

The subject of the embroidery is taken from the 15th century prose work Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory, an interpretation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Chapter three, Book VI, Volume I describes how four fantastical queens discover Sir Lancelot resting beneath an apple tree. Having placed an enchantment, they take him to a castle where he must choose between picking a queen as his ‘paramour’ or death.

Prioleau was sent a small watercolour of the design, and having traced it onto canvas, she then painstakingly worked the piece in silk threads. She was a master of her art, praised by Colin White for her use of satin stitch ‘cleverly angled across the picture like brushstrokes’, the effect being a ‘three-dimensional appearance’. Despite White’s comparison of threads with paint, E.A. Taylor in a Studio magazine article of December 1910 considers How Four Queens Found Sir Lancelot in the Wood to be refreshingly original precisely because to him, Prioleau seems ‘at pains to avoid imitating…the pictorial painter’. The association between King and Prioleau was not limited to this piece, the duo producing works including Richard Coeur de Lion, also illustrated in the Studio. This was a fruitful and widely admired artistic partnership.

How Four Queens Found Sir Lancelot enjoyed exposure in the foremost artistic forums of the day. A full-page colour image was first reproduced in the December 1910 volume of the Studio magazine with an accompanying article discussing the state of embroidery in Paris, as well as the design featuring in The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art the same year. Then, in 1912 the work was displayed at the Musée Galleria exhibition of embroidery, a show reported upon in the September edition of the Studio magazine. In both instances, the partnership between King and Prioleau is described in glowing terms. Whilst E. A. Taylor, King’s husband, is the author of both articles and therefore not an unbiased reporter, the publicity the embroidery received and consequently the high regard with which it must have been viewed is undeniable.