Unidentified Photographer, Portrait of Mary Perkins Taylor as a Student, c.1905, photo courtesy Family Collection

Portraitist and landscape painter, Mary Smyth Perkins Taylor was born in Philadelphia. At fifteen, she entered the Philadelphia School of Design for Women ( now Moore College of Art). She received numerous awards from the school, including a fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Paris (1901-1902) where the Paris Salon accepted Perkins self-portrait for its 1902 exhibition.
Perkins also studied and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where her teachers included Robert Henri, leader of the group of urban realists known as The Eight. She gained acceptance at the National Academy of Design in New York and the Corcoran in Washington D.C. An adventurous traveler, Perkins painted in the small Mexican town of Guanajuato in 1904 or 1905, and later headed the Art Department of Converse College in South Carolina.
Around 1906, Mary Smyth Perkins begun to study with William Lathrop at Phillips Mill, the center of the art community in Bucks County. Here she met fellow painter, William Taylor, whom she married in 1913. In the 1920s she began making hooked rugs, based on her paintings, and done in a bright pointillist style. Few of her panels or tapesteries survive today, as the colors from the natural dyes, made by the artist herself from plants in her garden, faded over time. In 1931, Mary Smyth Perkins Taylor died of inoperable cancer.