Visiting John Taylor Arms: A Master Printmaker and His Circle

Engraving copper plates with a simple sewing needle, John Taylor Arms was highly respected by his friends and fellow artists for his printmaking expertise as much as his amiable personality. Arms himself has been featured in a number of exhibitions that celebrate his precise engravings of European architecture, but this exhibition is the first to highlight Arms’s connection to other prominent figures in Connecticut. Helen Keller, Francis Luis Mora, Clare Leighton, and Thomas W. Nason all made their homes across the state, but made their mark right here in Fairfield by signing—and sometimes sketching—in John Taylor Arms’s studio guestbook.

Pictured: John Taylor Arms, “Our Studio Door”, 1922, etching on paper