See our review of Laura’s book The Glasgow Style.

(brooch for Liberty & Co; illustration from Seven Happy Days, 1913; portrait; design for her own bookplate)

She was the preeminent Glasgow Style book illustrator, but Jessie M. King also excelled in many oeuvres: textiles, ceramics, jewelry, posters, bookplates, interior design, and costumes. John Russell Taylor described her style perfectly in The Art Nouveau Book in Britain: “…the image she conjures up of pale ladies festooned in stars and attended by flights of birds, of wan haloed knights, lost in reverie and drifting through wispy landscapes of faint transfigured trees and insubstantial dream-castles of the mind, is not quite like anything else in art, and once entered, never wholly escaped from.”

Jessie Marion King was born in Bearsden, Scotland, a suburb of Glasgow, on March 20, 1875, the daughter of Mary Ann Anderson and Reverend James W. King of New Kilpatrick Parish. Jessie was the youngest of five. She was brought up by the family housekeeper Mary McNab, known as Mamie, who stayed with Jessie her entire life. Jessie learned a love of nature and animals as a children, particularly rabbits. She displayed an early talent for drawing, and was told she should go to the Glasgow School and train as an artist. But her parents were adamantly opposed to the idea. Jessie even hid her drawings in the hedges on the way home from school, worried that her parents would find them.

In the end, though, her father allowed Jessie to go to the School of Art at the age of seventeen with a view of becoming an art teacher. While her schooling was erratic-she did brilliantly in certain courses, but failed others such as Perspective Drawing-she was awarded scholarship to study in France and Italy. (Later, she credited the line drawings by Botticelli she saw in Italy as a major influence on her work.) In 1898, she won a silver medal at South Kensington for “The Light of Asia.” This got her noticed in the influential magazine The Studio.

In 1899, while still a student, Jessie taught part-time at the School of Art. While living with her best friend Helen Paxton Brown, she met Ernest Archibald Taylor. The two became engaged, although they did not marry until 1908.After finishing her studies, Jessie began to work for a number of German publishers. A popular series of illustrations from this time were the covers for various Albums von Berlin. Its publisher had written to Fra Newbery, Headmaster of Glasgow School of Art, looking for an illustrator in the new Glasgow Style.

Book design and illustration dominated her early work. In 1902, the Turin International Exhibition of Decorative Arts was held. Miss King’s work was included as part of the Scottish section; she won a gold medal for the book L’Evangile de l’Enfance.

Her work became so popular she had to resign from the Glasgow School of Art to concentrate on her commissions. Among the more important are illustrations for The High History of the Holy Graal and The Defence of Guenevere by William Morris. Miss King also designed jewelry and fabrics for Liberty & Co. She purchased a group of cottages in Kirkcudbright as an investment, including an old house she intended to live in someday named Greengate.

In 1908, Miss King married Ernest Taylor, and moved with him to Salford, near Manchester where Taylor was working for George Wragge, mostly designing stained glass. The next year, their only child Merle was born. Merle, which means “blackbird,” was named that for her black hair and the way she felt like a nestling to Jessie. Mary McNab moved in with the family to help out with the baby and never left.

The family moved to Paris in 1910 when Taylor became the Paris correspondent for The Studio. Paris was then the international center for artists, so the couple opened their own art school, the Shealing Atelier, which was very successful. Jessie illustrated a book of Paris sketches as well. They summered on the island of Arran, and ran a summer sketching school there as well.

But in 1914, when the war began, the family moved to the Greengate. A number of Jessie’s women artist friends moved there too, including Helen Paxton Brown and Mary Thew.

Taylor returned to write and lecture in Paris after the war ended, while Jessie and Merle stayed in Kirkcudbright. Jessie became very interested in batik and produced many scarves and bolts of fabtic for sale at Liberty’s and also gve batiking classes at the Greengate. She also wrote and illustrated a book called How Cinderella Was Able to Go to the Ball about batik.

Jessie also began decorating pottery blanks for sale, and she and Taylor also worked together creating mural designs in schools.

Miss King became a well-known, beloved sight in Kirkcudbright in her later years. She wore distinctive clothes: a wide brimmed Breton hat to protect her fair skin, long black cloak, black tights darned with colored thread. She loved to draw in chalk on the cobblestones outside Greengate, and decorated Easter eggs for the local children.

In 1949, Jessie designed her last illustration, a cover for The Parish of New Kilpatrick, her father’s parish. She died August 4, 1949, from a heart attack. At her wish, her ashes were scattered over the grave of Mary McNab. The playwright James Bridie wrote after her death, “At least, if Jessie has gone into another dimension it is one that she has always known and she will be perfectly at home in it.”