Jessie Marion King - A Versatile Artist and Educator

Jessie M. King was born in 1875 and received a strict religious education. Her artistic aspirations were strongly discouraged by her parents. Especially her mother Mary Ann destroyed all of Jessie's drawings when she found them a total waste of time. So Jessie Marion created in secret and hid everything she could. Their housekeeper Mary, on the other hand, encouraged the creativity of the young artist. Later, when Jessie was already married and established her own household, Mary became her housekeeper.

Jessie M. King was a teenager when she fell asleep on a sunny hill and had a strange experience. When she woke up she was certain that she was visited by fairies. She believed in fairy folk for her whole life and all her work is strongly infused with somehow ethereal surreal feel.

Eventually she convinced her parents that her talent needed formal education. She enrolled in Queen Margaret College and Glasgow School of Art. She became a trained art teacher and a tutor at Glasgow School of Art where she taught book cover design and ceramics decoration. She stayed there for approximately eight years until her marriage to Ernest Archibald Taylor. Contrary (almost controversially) to the customs of the time she decided to keep her maiden name even after the marriage. Her full name became Jessie Marion King, Mr. Ernest Archibald Taylor, but still signed everything just like before. In her marriage, one child (daughter Merle Elspeth) was born.

Jessie was influenced by all kinds of artistic movements which took specific elements to infuse everything together in her unique style which was even more special because she worked in so many areas of art. If we had to pick just the most important influences, that would be Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, and Ballets Russes as artistic movements, or Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Crane, William Morris, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Sandro Botticelli.

Jessie won a gold medal for book design at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin in 1901. The title of the book is L'Evangile de L'Enfance (frontispiece above) and here is an interesting tidbit: her certificate of winning was attributed to Signor (Mister) Jessie Marion King. Today it's hard to imagine, but not so long ago it was unheard of to even think about a woman as a successful artist, not to mention a woman who was able to beat men in a competition of any kind.

By the way, she won numerous awards.

Among other places, she traveled to Italy, Germany, and France (she lived with her husband in Paris for about three years where he was a professor and they co-founded the Shieling Atelier), she also co-established a summer painting school on the Isle of Arran, and actively worked in artists' communities in Salford and Kirkcudbright.

She was one of the Glasgow Girls, more than a dozen female artists who created in different areas at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. They were an important part of the Art Nouveau movement with a distinguished British flavor (especially with the Arts and Crafts movement) called the Glasgow style. Glasgow Girls were a mixture of creators, educators, and political activists. Their name came into use when most of the 'Glasgow Girls' were already dead but their influence on painting and design is still visible, especially in ceramics, jewelry, and textiles which were not considered as part of art before.

Jessie Marion is today best known for her book illustrations and covers (more than one hundred titles!) but she also designed wallpapers, costumes, jewelry, and embroidered panels, she painted pottery, created murals, was a bookbinder and was a designer of postcards, posters, and bookplates (with inventive usage of different materials, like Japanese vellum or gold dust). She is also considered a pioneer of batik in Europe.

If you want a short list of signature characteristics of her style, that would be the excessive usage of dots (pointillism), clear colors, decorative frames, and halos surrounding the heads of many of her characters. Among connoisseurs of art, her early work is considered better than her later creations.

Her creations are displayed in numerous art galleries and museums. For instance: the National Gallery of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie, Glasgow Museums, Edinburgh and the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford, Stewartry Museum, Kirkcudbright, etc.

More:
https://manyinterestingfacts.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/learn-batik-with-cinderella/

http://vintagebooks.canalblog.com/archives/2023/11/26/40120895.html

https://jessie-m-king-fairy-world.carrd.co/