Taylor, Will S.

Will Samuel Taylor (1882-1968), professor of art, was born in Ansonia, Connecticut, on November 27, 1882. He studied at the Massachusetts State Art School in Boston and the Art Students League in New York City. From 1910 to 1912 he traveled in Alaska and British Columbia to do research in preparation for the series of murals depicting the North Pacific Indian which he painted for the American Museum of Natural History. While he was executing these paintings between 1915 and 1925, he also taught painting at Pratt Institute. In 1926 he traveled in Europe to do research for eight murals on the evolution of man for the Morgan Memorial Hall of the Museum of Natural History. In 1926 he also was appointed assistant professor of art and curator of the art collection at Brown. He was promoted to associate professor in 1931 and full professor in 1949. He was chairman of the Department of Art from 1926 to 1949. He continued his work on the murals for the Museum, which included representations of the Neolithic Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Viking, and the Steel Age. From charcoal sketches he had made he painted the murals in the studio the University provided at the rear of his home on George Street, where his students could observe him at his work, with his stepladder, his lens (for observing the painting in reverse) and his opera glasses (for changing his perspective of the painting). According to Taylor, “In no other way would it be possible to explain and demonstrate so clearly the solution of problems in perspective, scale, design, pattern, composition and color arising in mural painting.” Other mural paintings by Taylor include two in the Providence Street School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and one of the burning of the schooner Gaspee, which he painted for the new building of the Firemen’s Mutual and Union Mutual Insurance Company in Providence in 1954. He retired from teaching in 1953. He died on December 5, 1968, in New London, Connecticut.