Henry Fitch Taylor

Henry Fitch Taylor started out as an actor, but traveled to Paris in the early 1880s to study painting at the Académie Julian. He returned to the United States a few years later and created landscape paintings inspired by the French impressionists. He participated in the 1913 Armory Show, in which revolutionary examples of painting and sculpture inspired many American artists to explore modern styles. Although he was almost sixty years old, Taylor began to experiment with cubism and futurism and created dramatic, abstract images. He was fascinated by color and studied different combinations, publishing his findings in the Taylor System of Organized Color. (Homer, ed., Avant-Garde Painting & Sculpture in America, 1910-25, 1975)