Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, et al. Women Only Works on Paper. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.34.

Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.255.

Having learnt pastel from Henry Tonks whilst attending the Slade in 1919, Edith Granger-Taylor worked almost exclusively in this medium, or crayon, for the rest of her life.

Reporting on her 1932 exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, the art critic from The Scotsman wrote that Granger-Taylor used 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, expressed 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. Her remarkable abstract compositions date to the 1930s.

We are grateful to Nicholas Granger-Taylor for assistance