Initially apprenticed in the Glasgow shipbuilding industry, Ernest Archibald Taylor trained as an artist at the Glasgow School of Art, where he met Jessie M. King around 1898.
He worked for Wylie & Lochhead from around this time where his furniture designs brought him great acclaim with exhibitions at the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition and, with his fiancée Jessie M. King, crafted a series of stained glass panels for the Turin International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in 1902.
Taylor went on to lecture in furniture design at the Glasgow School of Art from 1903 to 1905. In 1908 he married Jessie King and moved to Manchester to manage and design for George Wragge Ltd where he produced many designs for stained glass.
Between 1911 and 1914 the Taylors lived in Paris where they established an art school – the Shealing Atelier.
