Greengate

About Greengate

‘Greengate’ was the home of the artist and designer Jessie M King, one of the leading figures in Kirkcudbright’s artistic community from 1915 until her death in 1949. She studied and taught in the Glasgow School of Art and was eminent as a book illustrator in the Scottish ‘Art Nouveau’ movement or ‘Glasgow Style’ as it became known. She purchased the property and the cottages down Greengate Close (then called McWhinnie’s Close) in 1908 as a ‘bolt-hole’ from Glasgow, but then went on to teach in Paris with her husband – the artist and designer E A Taylor - until the outbreak of the First Word War.

She converted the cottages in the close into studios for artists and makers, and from the 1920s there was a ‘Greengate Close Coterie’ of predominantly women artists. From here, Jessie King and her husband also arranged summer art schools on the Isle of Arran and in Kirkcudbright and forged bonds with a younger generation of students from Edinburgh College of Art, several of whom were later to play a prominent role in Kirkcudbright’s artistic community and in the town generally.

Taylor died in 1951 and above the entry to the close is a mosaic panel recording the fact that E A Taylor and Jessie M King lived and worked here. It was commissioned by their friend, Charles Oppenheimer - another of Kirkcudbright’s leading artists – and unveiled in 1954.