page_title: Isaac Taylor (1759–1829)
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Isaac Taylor (1759–1829) / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Petruchio forces Katherina to call the sun the moon in The Taming of the Shrew
context_page_description: Isaac Taylor (1759–1829) of Ongar was an English engraver and writer of books for the young.
context_section_description: The son of Isaac Taylor (1730–1807) by his wife Sarah, daughter of Josiah Jefferys of Shenfield, Essex, he was born in London on 30 January 1759. With his elder brother Charles Taylor, after some education at Brentford grammar school, he was brought up as an engraver in the studio of his father, and worked both in landscape and portraiture.
  During his apprenticeship the plates for Abraham Rees's edition of Chambers's Cyclopaedia were executed under his superintendence at his father's establishment, and he met Rees. In 1781 he commissioned Richard Smirke to paint four small circular subjects representing morning, noon, evening, and night, which he engraved and published; and two years later he painted and engraved a set of views on the Thames near London. In 1783 he moved from Islington to Red Lion Street, Holborn, and in June 1786 he left London for Lavenham in Suffolk, where he rented a house and a large garden.
  He continued his work as an engraver. He was commissioned to engrave a number of plates for John Boydell's Bible and Shakespeare. In 1791 he engraved the assassination of Rizzio after John Opie (for which the Society of Arts awarded him their gold palette and twenty-five guineas), and in 1796 he completed a book of forty plates illustrating the architectural details of the fifteenth-century church at Lavenham, entitled Specimens of Gothic Ornaments selected from the parish church of Lavenham in Suffolk. He also sketched in watercolours and engraved a series of Suffolk mansions.
caption: Engraving for Act V of The Taming of the Shrew, Boydell's edition.
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