Born in 1875 in Philadelphia, Mary Smyth Perkins began her art instruction at the age of fifteen at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art). She studied with William Sartain until 1897, and won numerous awards, including a William L. Elkins Fellowship to study abroad. Perkins enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1899, where she studied under Robert Henri, founder of the Ashcan school of realist painters, or the Eight, as they later came to be known. In 1901 Perkins studied in Paris and in 1905 she painted in the Mexican village of Guanajuato. From 1907- 1910 she took a job heading up the art department at Converse College in South Carolina, while also taking trips to New Hope, Pennsylvania to study with William Lathrop. It was here that Perkins met painter William Francis Taylor, and they married in 1913. They settled in Lumberville, Pennsylvania.

Perkins painted portraits and landscapes and exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Mary Smyth Perkins Taylor died in 1931.