Doves and Dreams - opens 27 January 2007

A major retrospective of leading exponents of the Glasgow Style

Doves and Dreams: the Art of Frances Macdonald and J Herbert McNair, the first exhibition to be devoted to their artistic partnership opens at the Walker Art Gallery from 27 January to 22 April 2007.

Alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frances’s sister Margaret Macdonald, the couple formed the legendary Glasgow Four at the turn of the 20th century. This pioneering exhibition celebrates Frances Macdonald and McNair’s considerable, yet lesser known, contribution to the group and the Glasgow Style. The exhibition also includes the first exploration of the married couple’s 10 years in Liverpool.

This major retrospective is a stunning display of around 100 works from public and private collections from the UK and USA, including watercolours, graphics, furniture, metalwork, textiles and decorative arts.

The first section of the exhibition deals with their ambitious and idealistic student years at the Glasgow School of Art where the Macdonald sisters met Mackintosh and McNair in the early 1890s. Featuring furniture by McNair as well as examples of graphic design and metalwork by all four, this section shows their promising start.

Herbert McNair and the Macdonald sisters also produced impressive watercolours at this time. In particular the Macdonald sisters’ captivating illustrations for The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris demonstrate their prodigious talent. The exhibition includes this unique volume, discovered in the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA in 2005.

The second section concentrates on the couple’s life in Liverpool from 1899 to 1909 where McNair took up the position of instructor in design at University College Liverpool’s newly-established School of Architecture and Applied Arts. Housed in makeshift wooden buildings with corrugated iron roofs, known as “the Art Sheds”, the new department shared Glasgow School of Art’s multi-disciplinary approach and the belief in the unity of the crafts.

The couple lived within the university district at 54 Oxford Street and made their first project the decoration of their new home. Elegant furniture designed for the house is on display alongside photographs of the interiors. The images reveal highly stylised rooms, without doubt the most avant-garde domestic interiors of that date in Liverpool. 

The highlight of this section is the reconstruction of their 1902 entry for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art, Turin. The couple created the most ambitious exhibition installation of their careers with their spectacular Lady’s Writing Room.  The room brought together the best of their furniture, graphic, glass and textile design and watercolours. This sensitive reconstruction using both original artefacts and recreated objects allows today’s viewers to appreciate the impressive range of the couple’s skills just as Turin audiences did more than 100 years ago.

The third and final section deals with the couple’s return to Glasgow after Liverpool University’s Applied Arts department closed in 1905.

The couple sought to re-establish themselves in the city which had given them such a promising start but found much had changed. Macdonald taught occasionally at the Glasgow School of Art but McNair struggled to find any work.

The final years of the couple’s life were marked by sadness and separation with McNair finally turning to drink. The output of both artists had diminished since they had left Liverpool with the exception of a collection of outstanding watercolours produced by Macdonald in the years before she died. The final section of the exhibition features seven of these haunting images which convey complex and personal subject matters, unprecedented in her earlier work. They have few if any parallels in British painting of the early twentieth century.

Macdonald died in Glasgow in 1921 with some accounts suggesting she took her own life. McNair, distraught by his wife’s death, is reputed to have destroyed much of her work and never worked again.

Despite the setbacks at the end of their brief careers, the astonishing array of work produced by Macdonald and McNair in the 1890s and early 1900s provide a powerful argument for the couple’s significant contribution to the promotion of Mackintosh’s creativity and the development of the Glasgow Style. The exhibition is a fascinating insight into two of the most consistently inventive and individual artist-designers of this period in Britain.

Doves and Dreams is a unique partnership between with the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow and the Walker Art Gallery. The exhibition is on show at the Hunterian Art Gallery from 12 August to 18 November 2006. For more info visit www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk

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