Mary Harvey Tannahill was an American painter, printmaker, embroiderer and batik maker. She studied in the United States and Europe and spent 30 summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the artist colony there. She was instructed by Blanche Lazzell there and assumed the style of the Provincetown Printers. She exhibited her works through a number of artist organizations. A native of North Carolina, she spent much of her career based in New York.
Mary Harvey Tannahill, Mother and daughter, 1910, photograph, Provincetown
Mary Harvey Tannahill, Untitled (Woman sitting by a window), Competition for Women Photographers, 1912
Mary Harvey Tannahill, The Sisters, 1920, oil on canvas, Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina
Provincetown Printers were a group of artists, most of them women, who created art using woodblock printing techniques in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the early 20th-century. It was the first group of its kind in the United States, developed in an area when European and American avant-garde artists visited in number after World War I. The "Provincetown Print", a white-line woodcut print, was attributed to this group. Rather than creating separate woodblocks for each color, one block was made and painted. Small groves between the elements of the design created the white line. Because the artists often used soft colors, they sometimes have the appearance of a watercolor painting.
Agnes Weinrich, Broken Fence, a white-line woodblock made in or before 1917; at left: the woodblock itself; at right: a print pulled from the woodblook.