One of the enticing things about the work of Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh is the intimate creative partnership they shared. Their friend Muthesius called them the Künstlerpaar – the ‘art couple’. It’s part of what attracted me to their work, and I’ve written and talked about it for, gosh, over 15 years now. For Valentine’s Day, here a selection of things to swoon over…
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The Heart of the Rose, ca. 1902. Painted plaster panel, 96.8 x 94 cm. The Glasgow School of Art.
First, here is a talk I did a year ago for the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society on artistic couples.
‘The May Queen’, 1900. Oil-painted gesso on hessian and scrim, set with twine, glass beads, thread, motherof- pearl, and tin leaf; 158.4 x 457 cm. Collection: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, E.1981.177.1-3. Original Location: Ladies Luncheon Room, Miss Cranston’s tea rooms, Ingram Street, Glasgow. Provenance: Removed from the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1971.
“Just now, we are working on two large panels for the frieze… Miss Margaret Macdonald is doing one and I am doing the other. We are working them together and that makes the work very pleasant.”-Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Hermann Muthesius, July 1900
When locals hear my (somewhat diluted) American accent for the first time, they ask me ‘what brought ye to Glasgow’? I usually answer ‘Charles Rennie Mackintosh’, but in truth, it was his wife Margaret Macdonald, and the work they created together.
It’s been nearly 15 years since I moved to our dear green place to study, and my earliest research was focused on the Mackintosh-Macdonald collaborative projects, especially for Kate Cranston’s tearooms. Cranston was an interesting character, seen in photographs mixing vintage dresses (some 30-40 years our of date in style) with contemporary hats, showing her eclectic tastes that prompted her to hire the young and original Mackintosh.
Kate Cranston ca. 1903. Her dress is circa 1865 in style, while her hat is bang on trend.
The famous Willow Tea Rooms underwent a major conservation project a couple years ago and has re-opened as Mackintosh at the Willow; and you can read more about it’s gorgeous Salon de Luxe at a post I wrote here. The two large gesso panels I’ll discuss here were made for the Miss Cranston’s Lunch and Tea Rooms on Ingram Street in 1900. The May Queen by Macdonald and The Wassail by Mackintosh (his only gesso work), now hang side by side in the Kelvingrove. This was a necessity due to the available space in the museum, however they were made to hang across from each other, and I hope that at some point we will see them this way again. But why does this matter?
Designed in the year of their marriage, the White Dining Room at Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms at Ingram Street was the first interior that Mackintosh and Macdonald worked on together. Part of a series of different dining rooms, this space has been historically dubbed as the ‘Ladies Luncheon Room’ (including by the Kelvingrove Museum) due to its colour scheme. It might be a misnomer, but Kate Cranston, being a professional woman herself, did wish to create spaces where ladies would feel more comfortable conducting business and leisure (away from the affairs, and perhaps gazes, of men). We know Cranston advertised that she had ‘a special rest room for business ladies’, as indicated in a lovely menu card designed by Jessie M. King in 1911. The feminine scheme of the room, particularly in colour (largely white, lavenders, and pinks), but most certainly in the elegant female figures depicted in the gesso panels, may have reflected the intended patrons of the space.
Like most of these spaces, it is unknown whether the rooms were designed around the panels, or vice-versa. Probably it was a combination—an overall scheme that harmonized the two. With Mackintosh interested in creating a gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), it is to be expected that each and every component of the room had a specific place and significance. Macdonald was a fitting collaborator for this commission—being an independent woman artist with a history of collaborative work with her sister Frances—and created a significant component of the scheme.
The room comprised the front of the main floor of the tearooms, and was separated from the narrow entrance hall by a mid-height screen. The walls were paneled silver and white to a height of ten feet, and the gesso panels sat opposite each other in the upper third of the east and west walls. A bank of windows stretched along the north wall, allowing natural light to reflect off the white and silver walls below the panels. The color, in combination with the natural light, created a gentle and serene environment for quiet conversation. The dining furniture was of dark wood, with long tables and high-backed chairs arranged to emphasize the horizontal length of the space. The elongation of the furniture and the interior was reflected in the elongation of the forms in the gesso panels.
The gesso panels in the frieze are perhaps the most significant aspects of this room. The couple crafted these first panels together in the busy months before their August, 1900 marriage, while simultaneously setting up their own flat at 120 Mains Street, Glasgow, and making arrangements to install their exhibit at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in October. In a letter to Hermann Muthesius dated 12th July, 1900, now in the collection of the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, Mackintosh reported:
I am not nearly done with “Miss Cranstons” yet it has involved a great lot of work. Just now we are working at two large panels for the frieze 15 feet long x 5 [feet] 3 ins [sic] high… We have set ourselves a very large task as we are slightly modelling and then colouring and setting the jewels of different colours.
Before they were installed at Ingram Street, the gesso panels were shown at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition. The May Queen and The Wassail were arguably experimental in their construction, and may have proved fragile on their journey to Vienna and back, particularly because of their scale. The linear designs were not painted but constructed of twine pinned to the canvas in an almost haphazard fashion, with glass beads, shell, tin, and painted and modeled plaster “jewels”, almost an inch in relief, fixed to the surface. All of Macdonald’s subsequent panels are much lower in relief, and the linear designs are made of piped plaster instead of twine.
The May Queen and The Wassail remained in situ after Cranston sold all of her tea rooms and retired in 1918-19. They were salvaged from the building in 1971, but they did not, unfortunately, escape unscathed: while the tea rooms remained open under different management, but with respect for their special character, until 1950, after this they declined and were terribly abused by overpainting under various other businesses such as a souvenir shop. Glasgow Museums Curator Alison Brown related to me in a 2007 interview: “The room paneling had at least seven layers of different white and cream paints—so that gives you an idea of how the rooms were treated.” Both The May Queen and The Wassail were painted in the same colors: creamywhite faces with poorly repainted features, the string painted chocolate brown, with the golden background over-painted a jade green and the roses and flowers colored in pink. The rooms were dismantled and saved in 1970. The damage was fortunately reversible and the paintings were painstakingly cleaned and conserved in 1995, and The Ladies Luncheon Room was reconstructed for the 1996 Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibit which toured the United States, returning the eye of the global art world to the work of the Glasgow Style.
‘The Wassail’, 1900. Oil-painted gesso on hessian and scrim, set with twine, glass beads, thread, mother-of- pearl, and tin leaf; 158.2 x 462 cm. Collection: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, E.1981.177.1-3. Original Location: Ladies Luncheon Room, Miss Cranston’s tea rooms, Ingram Street, Glasgow. Provenance: Removed from the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1971.
The Wassail depicts six female figures: two at center, with their heads inclined towards each other, flanked by two more figures at each side. Like Mackintosh’s decoration for the Buchanan Street rooms, these figures are not fully formed, and seem to emerge from a vinelike decorative pattern reminiscent of Japanese design. By contrast, The May Queen is a more complicated composition. Five women are depicted, and their stylized robes make them appear more fully formed than those in The Wassail. The Queen is at center in a teardropshaped garment, faerie wings inscribed in linear decoration at her back. The figures at left and right stand like ladies-in-waiting, holding garlands of flowers between them which span horizontally in front of and behind the Queen. New shoots of vine spring forth at their feet, and flowers dot the canvas in a random pattern. The contrasting angles and curves in the contours of the design, as well as the women’s faces and kimono-like garments, are reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints. Although symmetrical in design, Macdonald’s composition is looser than Mackintosh’s. There is energy in The May Queen that reflects the birth of spring, while the stillness of The Wassail suggests winter’s death; they work in unison to convey this cycle.
The original oppositional placement of panels suggests a dialogue. Across from each other, they subtly encourage a discourse between these two representations of festivals that, like the panels, signify opposite celebration/worship times of the year. The May Queen is derived from May-Day celebrations, held on May 1st, whereby a young girl (a virgin) is chosen to be Queen for the day, and celebrants dance with her about a Maypole (a phallus) to celebrate the return of spring; as such, this event can be viewed as a fertility rite. It is possible, too, that Macdonald’s image is directly related to a poem by a favorite poet of hers, Tennyson, also titled “The May Queen”. The refrain reads:
But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
The Wassail is not as easy to interpret, as there is no direct festival related to it, and no obvious signifiers in the image of what wassail is or means. The word comes from the Old English “wæs hæil” which means “your health”, and was used as a toast. Later, it came to be the name for the liquor, usually a spiced wine or ale, drunk at Christmas or Twelfth Night Celebrations. Through this, it also became identified as the custom of drinking this libation, usually from a special wooden bowl. Finally, it is a carol, a song to be sung at the event of “wassailing”. Thus wassail is many things—a salutation, a drink, a custom, and ultimately, a celebration—which might be fitting for a tea room atmosphere, were it not for the incongruous aspect of wassail being an alcoholic drink, which is at odds with a temperance tea room.
There is also no obvious representation of a drink, a salutation, or a celebration in Mackintosh’s panel. It conveys a very quiet and staid atmosphere, as the two central figures mirror each other, heads bowed and eyes closed, within a cocoon-like arrangement of vines. The composition of each of the figures is closed; the sentinels to the right and left have their robes folded close about them as they gaze at two figures at center. Two butterflies, one on either side of the sleeping figures, foreshadow the blossoming of these forms come spring. It is at odds with the idea of festival.
However there is one other possible meaning for wassail which may explain the quiet composition—wassailing was also performed by farmers for the fertility of plants and animals, by either drinking to their health, or pouring a libation into the earth. In fact, an 1895 text by Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The evil eye: an account of this ancient and widespread superstition, speaks of the “old Christmas Custom of wassailing the apple trees” (and for fans of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage, you might have seen the episode where this custom is still in effect!). This idea has roots in Celtic and Germanic traditions of Yule, or winter festivals, that represented the death of the God, or the male aspect of the earth, whose seeds lie dormant in the land until the return of the Goddess in the spring. The red “lollipop trees” in Mackintosh’s composition could, in fact, be seen as representations of apple trees, signifying both the cider drink itself, and the plants which are wassailed each winter, the women at either side coming to offer libations for the trees to awaken and grow. Thus The Wassail can be seen as a visual representation of winter’s sleep, of life lying dormant, the opposite of the blossoming of spring found in the vibrancy of The May Queen.
These panels are exemplary of interests in the Celtic Revival of the time, but extend them to British heritage in general: May-Day celebrations and “wassailing” are particularly English traditions, with roots in Saxon and Nordic cultures. In Scotland, May-Day was known as Beltane, one of the four ancient quarter-days, and was (and still is) celebrated differently with the lighting of the bael-fire, or bonfire; and the most famous of the wassail carols, ‘Here we come a-wassailling’, is from England, the birthplace of Macdonald (an aside: when I teach this subject to my students, it is only the English, American and Canadian ones who know the word or indeed the song). In this manner, both themes suggest Macdonald’s heritage, for although Scottish in ancestry, she was English in birth and upbringing. But that both found such subjects appealing is clear; one does not have to dig very deeply to find a communion with nature and the metaphysical, clear in the abundance of natural motifs and otherworldly females in both Mackintosh and Macdonald’s work.
As you can see there is a rich and considered history behind these beautiful works of art, that includes not just what they portray, but where and how they were displayed. So while I am very happy that we can still gaze upon them together in the Kelvingrove, I hope that in future they will be reinstated in their original configuration, so that they may gaze upon each other as they were intended.
If you are interested to learn more about the tearooms, you can also download an article I’ve written on the Willow from RADAR, the GSA research repository. – Robyne
‘O YE, all ye that walk in Willowwood… that walk with hollow faces burning white…’ In honour of world poetry day, I’d like to share an excerpt of some older research on the Willow Tea Rooms here in Glasgow, the decorative theme of which was inspired by my favourite Dante Gabriel Rossetti poem: Willowwood.
O YE, all ye that walk in Willowwood… that walk with hollow faces burning white…
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Willow Tea Rooms (1903), Glasgow
In honour of world poetry day, I’d like to share an excerpt of some older research on the Willow Tea Rooms here in Glasgow, the decorative theme of which was inspired by my favourite Dante Gabriel Rossetti poem: Willowwood.
As most will be aware, this building is undergoing its own exciting restoration project lead by The Willow Tea Rooms Trust, and will re-open this June as an expanded ‘Mackintosh at the Willow’ experience. But don’t worry, there will certainly be tea & cake still! The original tea room, opened in 1903, was designed by Mackintosh for its fascinating proprietor Katherine Cranston, and takes its name from the street upon which it sits, Sauchiehall, which loosely translates ‘meadow of willows’ in Gaelic. Mackintosh remodelled an extant building and in addition to the main dining room, the upper floors contained a smoking and billiards room for gentlemen, while the crowning jewel of the Willow, the Salon de Luxe – a lavender and silver toned dining room, intended to appeal to female clientele – took pride of place on the second floor of the building, taking full advantage of the Northern light from the Mackintosh’s new stained-glass bow window.
‘Salon de Luxe’ at the Willow Tea Rooms (1903)
For the interior of this dazzling room, Mackintosh enlisted the aid of his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Specifically, Macdonald crafted a gesso panel for this room, arguably amongst her most beautiful, titled after the first line in the third sonnet of Rossetti’s cycle of four, O Ye, All Ye That Walk In Willowwood. The Salon de Luxe is a quintessential example of how the Mackintoshes engaged with Symbolist practices in the creation of a gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. The panel may be viewed as a narrative key to understanding the space’s meaning.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ‘O Ye All Ye That Walk in Willowwood’, 1902, gesso and glass beads, 1645 x 585 mm. Collection: Glasgow Museums, E.2001.6
What follows is an excerpt from a longer essay focused on the Salon de Luxe. But for this post I’m going to focus on the analysis of the poems. Literary analysis isn’t something I often get a chance to tackle, and I enjoyed writing this a great deal. Unfamiliar readers may wish to spend some time with the original poems (posted here from his text The House of Life), considering them on your own before reading my interpretation.
Rossetti’s Willowwood
The ‘Willowwood’ sonnets form the heart of a larger work by Rossetti, The House of Life. Rossetti scholar Jerome McGann tells us ‘The House of Life project grew out of the composition of these four poems in December 1868’ and argues that the Willowwood sonnets are a sort of miniaturized version of The House of Life, both expressing ‘a problem about love and the hope of its fulfilment.’[i] There are varied interpretations of the sonnets and of the work as a whole, but in Rossetti’s own words: ‘I should wish to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions; and in carrying out my scheme of the House of Life (if ever I do so) shall try to put in action a complete ‘dramatis personae’ of the soul.’[ii] On other interpretations, McGann observes: ‘[e]veryone agrees, however, that the ambiguities all pivot around [Rossetti’s] complex love-commitments, and especially his commitments to his wife Elizabeth, on one hand, who died in early 1862, and his friend’s wife Jane Morris, on the other.’ The sonnets, told in first-person narrative, suggest that the speaker is Rossetti himself; to clarify the discussion here, the three main characters in this drama will be referred to in the following manner: The Poet (the narrator), the Lost Love (the vision of a lost love), and Love (personified).
The first sonnet opens with The Poet sitting with personified Love by a ‘woodside well.’ Upon Love’s touching of his lute, The Poet recalls the voice of his Lost Love, and begins to weep. His tears fall into the well, and the rippling of the water creates a vision. With the sweep of Love’s wing-feathers touching the water, the vision of his lost love rises to meet him, and The Poet leans down to touch his lips with hers on the surface of the water. This image is quite important, as it is symbolically represented in the Willowwood panel, as shall be seen.
Here, Rossetti establishes important contrasting themes for the rest of the work: passion and sorrow, love and loss. ‘Willowwood I’ also serves as an introduction for iconography in the work, and as a reminder of Rossetti’s influences, chiefly Italian art and poetry such as Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, which is similarly centred on the narrator’s pining for an unattainable Love, mediated by encounters and discourses with personified Love. Rossetti comes to this theme repeatedly in his poetry and art, such as in his famous Beata Beatrix, appropriating Christian iconography and transforming it into his own symbolic conventions to relate an imagined moment from the Vita Nuova. In an 1873 letter to William Graham, for whom he painted a replica, Rossetti explained Beata Beatrix in the following manner:
The picture must of course be viewed not as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice, but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfiguration… and in sign of the supreme change, the radiant bird, a messenger of death, drops the white poppy between her hands.[iii]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Beata Beatrix’, c.1864-70. oil on canvas. Collection: Tate Britain.
Thus instead of a white dove or a red rose, symbols that are more familiar Christian signifiers, he appropriates the bird/flower iconography of the god/virgin relationship, and creates a red bird/white poppy messenger of death. The symbolic language is familiar, yet not, like a different iconographic dialect.
Rossetti’s twisting of iconography appears in both his painting and poetry, foreshadowing later Symbolist interventions. Take for example, the central component of the well in Willowwood (which we shall see in the central formal element of the gesso panel, the green oval). Symbolically, wells are meeting as well as drinking places, which is an intriguing consideration for a tea room theme. In ‘Willowwood I’, we witness two metaphysical meetings, as seen through the gaze of the poet: first, with Love, whose eyes he meets in the waters below, and second, with the Lost Love who comes forth from the reflected eyes of Love in the water. The well itself is a liminal space, a site for The Poet to encounter his Lost Love, whether she is the spectre of a dead woman, or simply someone out of his reach. Both images suggest a moment between the physical and spiritual, suggestive of sensuality and desire through the encounter with Love and the kiss.
The second sonnet opens with the words ‘And now Love Sang’, which would seem to suggest we are about to hear his song. Instead, Rossetti makes us wait, and rather describes the nature of the song, as well as the rising action of the drama that occurs while Love sings, indicated by the first words of the last line of the sonnet ‘And still Love sang.’ Rossetti describes the song in complex terms, and while it has been argued that these lines may somehow reference souls waiting for the ‘second coming,’ [iv] there is precedent for another more esoteric theme here, that of reincarnation. In 1854, Rossetti wrote the poem ‘Sudden Light’ while vacationing with Elizabeth Siddal in Hastings:
I HAVE been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. 10
Has this been thus before? And shall not thus time’s eddying flight Still with our lives our love restore In death’s despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?[v]
There can be little question that reincarnation is the theme of this poem, signalled by the opening of each verse: ‘I have been here before… you have been mine before… has this been thus before?’ In Willowwood, Love’s song is akin to one ‘disused souls’ would sing, ‘meshed with half-remembrance’ when their ‘new birthday tarries long’; in other words when they are waiting to reincarnate, and filled with fading memories of their former life. This interpretation is especially poignant when considering the subsequent lines about the dumb throng, the mournful forms which emerge from the wood, who The Poet recognizes as their former selves, ‘The shades of those our days that had no tongue.’ They could be memories, but could also be shadows of past lives. All of this happens in the same moment as the kiss upon the water, at which these shades cry out in longing as we are returned to the song of love, which is the subject of the next sonnet.
This third sonnet is the most important for the purposes of this study, as its first line is the title of Macdonald’s panel. This sonnet is actually Love’s song, but rather than being a ‘romantic’ ballad sung by Love as troubadour, it is a mournful song that offers a poignant message: pining for lost love is fruitless, and will bring naught but more pain.
Here is an appropriate place to address a question that is perhaps the most important in interpreting both Rossetti’s poem and Macdonald’s work: what, in a larger sense, is a Willowwood? In a literal sense, it is the wood of willows next to the well in which the action takes place. But willowwood also carries with it several symbolic connotations. The associations of the willow with sorrow and mourning are evident. In an agricultural light, willows are found near riverbanks, and their roots are excellent for preventing soil erosion. Thus, they are associated with water (also a signifier of continuity), which is represented by the well in the poem. It is also an ancient medicinal plant. The bark and leaves are rich in salicin, a natural glucoside akin to the active ingredient in aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid. The most common way of utilizing the willow’s healing properties was to boil its bark in water and drink it; in other words, to make tea. Finally, Willows were also considered guardians, and planted around cemeteries to keep spirits bound. This could apply to the ‘shades’ in ‘Willowwood II’ that manifest themselves each next to a tree, but have no voice to speak with, and which do not approach the action of the scene.
The place that is Willowwood is defined by all of these associations, and also by the action ascribed by Love’s song. Those who ‘walk in Willowwood’ are those who mourn yet long (‘hollow faces burning bright’), those who have been left behind in ‘soul-struck widowhood’, whose existence has become ‘one lifelong night’. This last could have a double meaning: night, as in the darkness, but also as in the time when spirits can be seen (and perhaps even touched). The song goes on to suggest that these souls cultivate their sorrow in vain, those who ‘wooed your last hope lost’ and ‘in vain invite your lips to that their unforgotten food’. This is a direct reference to The Poet’s action of kissing the vision in the well, which the shades—manifestations of the lovers—lament in longing. Thus Willowwood is a place of mourning, if not a place of the dead, where yearning souls (living or not) dwell, those who attempt in vain to be with those lost to them.
The sextet that follows offers even more insight into the painful nature of Willowwood:
Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood, With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red: Alas! if ever such a pillow could Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,—
Here we again find Rossetti’s colour symbolism: red and white used interchangeably for love, passion, life and death. This is reinforced by the rhyme scheme: the second line of the octet ends ‘burning white’ while the second line of the sextet ends ‘burning red’; and each have their own associations within their verse: ‘white’ rhymes with ‘night’, ‘invite’, and ‘light’; and ‘red’ rhymes with ‘dead’. The word associations within the rhyme serve a similar function to the visual symbolism discussed above in Beata Beatrix, to connote colour and words in a crafting a reinvented system of signification.
Like these plants, dwellers in Willowwood are weakened by their tears and burning with their rage and passion. Also interesting to note is the bitter nature of each of these plants: spurge is an invasive plant that consumes and takes over wherever it takes root, and bloodwort was used medicinally to induce vomiting (spurge carries within it a milky white sap, while the red roots of bloodwort were used to make dyes). Thus in a beautiful crafting of language and imagery, Rossetti uses the natural plant-life found on an English riverbank as a tool to describe the bitter emotion involved in this sort of longing. Willowwood here is not just a place of mourning, but the mourning itself made manifest in the bitter banks of which Love laments that one cannot ‘steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead’ (and here, one cannot help but think of Elizabeth Siddal, who steeped herself in sleep with laudanum, then died from it).
The closing lines of the sonnet/song carry the potent message that love wishes to relate:
Better all life forget her than this thing, That Willowwood should hold her wandering!’
But far from offering closure, Love has planted the seed of hope in the midst of his song: the last line of the octet, in the middle of his song, he declares: ‘Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!’ Recall its rhymes, which when said together say, not coincidentally, ‘white night invite light’. This promise of light foreshadows the ambiguously hopeful ending of the final sonnet.
The cycle closes with a description of the end of the encounter, and an enigmatic image of hope. In the final sonnet, Rossetti analogizes the ending of the kiss as two clinging roses who, having withstood the ‘wind’s wellaway’ or Love’s lamentation, at the end of the day drop their leaves that had been loosened ‘where the heart-stain glows’. The opening line of the octet is also a double-entendre recalling the action of the second sonnet, the ‘meeting rose and rose’ (and the importance of rose symbolism to the Mackintoshes is well-known). The vision/phantom of Lost Love fades back, ‘drowned’ from view, and The Poet reveals uncertainty that he will ever see Her again. Yet at the end, Rossetti offers a hopeful twist: As The Poet takes a last draught of his Lost Love’s presence, Love leans forward and graces him with a blessing through his touch, his ‘moan of pity and grace’, and finally, in a potent visual image, moves his head ‘till both our heads were in his aureole.’ It is rather ambiguous as to whom the ‘both’ refers to, Love and The Poet, or The Poet and his Lost Love, but a potent case could be made for the latter if one recalls the themes of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the repetition of trinities. By encompassing both of the lovers’ heads in his aureole, Love joins the three of them, gracing them with his blessed halo and making profane love sacred. It is this interpretation of the Willowwood, as a place of unrequited love, where sorrow and longing mingle passionately with longing and hope that provides the most compelling interpretation of Macdonald’s Willowwood, and the Salon de Luxe.
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Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ‘O Ye All Ye That Walk in Willowwood’
The Willowwood panel is a symbolic illustration of Rossetti’s poems. It is in fact a continuous narrative of the vision of the Lost Love in the well, and the shades of her wandering the wood. The green oval at centre is the well, and the face that hovers inside it is that of the Lost Love. The similar features and hairstyles, plus an understanding of the poem, tell us that the other two figures are her shades, walking in a circular fashion about the well, inside the wood that is represented by the rhythmic gesso lines on the surface. The Poet and Love are also present, however. A ghostly hand hovers on the surface of the well; The Poet touching the surface of the water. The ripple this creates is in the form of a rose—this rose, along with the others found throughout the composition, denotes the presence of Love. However, the particular rose that is beneath the hand serves a dual function—it is positioned just over the Spirit’s lips, and is therefore also representative of the meeting of lips—the kiss—described in ‘Willowwood I’.
…
Surely it was a simple bit of logic which moved the Mackintoshes to borrow from Rossetti’s willow-themed poetry; but the Willowwood sonnets also embraced perhaps the most idealistic motif of the Mackintoshes’ life and work: love. There is a melancholy hopefulness to the theme, that in some other place we shall find those we love, that they wait, and that we should not linger on their loss. In the context of the design scheme, the Salon de Luxe is like a liminal space; somewhere not quite otherworldly, but also hardly typical of a public dining room: a chamber of glittering silver and lavender juxtaposed against the grey city beyond the windows; the musical clinking of china and whisper of voices versus the noise of the street. If the Willowwood panel depicts Rossetti’s sonnets, and the theme extended about the room in mirrors and leaded glass (like water, reflective surfaces), then the room itself becomes the wood in which she dwells. Her accompanying shades are the patrons who come for tea, passing through the fantastical doors to the otherworldly spaces, touching their lips to their libations as The Poet who drank from the well. The Salon de Luxe is, symbolically, Willowwood.
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[i] Jerome J. McGann, ed., The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [Rossetti Archive] (Freely distributed by IATH and the NINES consortium under a Creative Commons License, 2008), http://www.rossettiarchive.org/index.html. Comprised of sonnets written between the years of 1847-1870, the text ranges in size depending on its publication date, from the first sixteen-sonnet sequence published in the Fortnightly Review in March 1869, under the title ‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’; then subsequently added to and restructured until the final version of forty-five were published March 1, 1870.
I have long been bothered by the characterisation of Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald as being at odds in this photo… What is it that has made others have such a negative reading of this image?
The Immortals: Frances Macdonald, Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Katherine Cameron, Jessie Keppie, Margaret Macdonald, ca. 1893. Collection: GSA DC004/9
One of my favourite items in the Glasgow School of Art collection is a photo album of ‘The Immortals’: a group of friends studying at the Art School in the 1890s, and whose artistic interests can most clearly be scene in their wonderful group effort ‘The Magazine‘. Their interest in Symbolist art and faerie tales is very clear (see example below), and in her 1990 book Glasgow Girls,Jude Burkhauser suggested that the self-styled moniker of this group may have been inspired by Celtic mysticism (pp.49-50).
Lucy Raeburn (poem) & Agnes Raeburn (illustration), ‘Elfsong’ 1894. Pen and ink on paper, 31.8 x 25 cm, attached to page, signed bottom left “A. RAEBURN.” GSA Collection, from ‘The Magazine’ April 1894, p. 43.
Burkauser also suggested that these women artists calling themselves ‘The Immortals’ might reference the kind of posterity usually reserved for male artists of the academic variety, which very few females got to enjoy. But looking at the photo album, full of pictures of the women on a day out in the Ayrshire countryside with a few of their male companions, one might simply think that their being Immortals might just be down to that youthful feeling of invincibility – and what happens when such carefree moments are captured in a photograph to be shared in an unknown future (even via a form of technology they could not yet perhaps dream of).
The Immortals: Frances Macdonald, Margaret Macdonald, Katherine Cameron, Janet Aitken, Agnes Raeburn, Jessie Keppie, John Keppie, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, ca. 1893. Collection: GSA DC004/9
The album is comprised of a group of photos of the friends enjoying a sketching weekend at ‘The Roaring Camp’ in Dunure, the home of John Keppie (Mackintosh’s boss – an important point shortly). Perhaps the most well-known photo from this album is the one at the start of this post, of the women standing three and three, with the twenty-something Charles Rennie Mackintosh poised between them. He is not the usual focus of discussion in this image, however; that is reserved for the interesting exchange between the two women at far right: Jessie Keppie, John’s sister, and Margaret Macdonald. And the portrait often painted of the moment is not altogether flattering:
‘There is an astonishing vivid and frank expression of the fraught relationship between Jessie and Margaret caught in one of the photographs taken in the mid 1890s… Jessie Keppie, standing second from the right with her fist held provocatively, turns to confront Margaret Macdonald. The smaller Margaret stands her ground and stares back. It is not without a frisson.’ – William Buchanan, Mackintosh’s Masterwork, The Glasgow School of Art, p. 8.
I have long been bothered by the characterisation of Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald as being at odds in this photo. To my eye, the two women gaze at each other in familiarity, and although the image is even hazy in person, one can see that they are exchanging an amused glance. Keppie’s hand is not in a fist as the quote above suggests, but in an open-palmed gesture towards her friend. What is it that has made others have such a negative reading of this image?
Unfortunately, this interpretation is down to a rumoured love triangle between these two women and Mackintosh: he was once reportedly engaged to Jessie, but of course later married Margaret in 1900. It has been assumed Charles and Jessie were betrothed during this period, and he is seen next to her in some of the photos, such as the one below where he seems to steady her arm with his hand. But one might argue that this was merely gentlemanly: we also see McNair at the other end, holding hands with both Macdonald sisters (though he does eventually marry Frances in 1899), and in fact all the group seem to brace each other on the possibly precarious stone wall. But because of the story of the broken engagement, some have surmised that the aforementioned photo must show the tension between two woman at war over the love of the charismatic man at centre.
The Immortals: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Jessie Keppie, Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Katherine Cameron, Frances Macdonald, John Keppie (head and shoulders), Herbert MacNair and Margaret Macdonald, ca. 1893. Collection: GSA DC004/9
William Buchanan is not the only person to view that image in this manner. The story that Mackintosh jilted his boss’s sister is one that is commonly repeated, now taken as rote. According to Roger Billcliffe, it may have initially been told to Mackintosh’s first major biographer, Thomas Howarth, by Francis Newbury’s daughter Mary Newbury Sturrock. But as he points out in his recent book The Art of the Four, she was ‘not yet born when these events took place and… would have been quoting, or making deductions, from later family discussions.’ (p. 24) He continues: ‘Many years later, in discussions with [me], she modified the word “engagement” to “an understanding”, as close perhaps to a withdrawal of the original suggestion as she was able to make.’ Billcliffe also points to discrepancies in Timothy Neat’s account of events in his book Part Seen, Part Imagined (1994), showing convincingly that the timeline of events, alongside the fact that no formal engagement was announced as would have been appropriate for the social rank of the Keppies, make such an arrangement rather dubious. It is a compelling discussion that filled me with relief to read, as it makes previous interpretations of this ‘Immortals’ photo rather questionable, as I had suspected.
But just in case I was reading my own biased vision into this picture, I decided to do what any contemporary researcher might – I asked the internet! Taking it to my personal Facebook page, I asked friends, without context, how they would characterise the interaction between these two:
There is something “knowing” being shared between them. Her exposed palm is something striking to me in the photo. A softness or bit of connection in that hand. Such a willingness to look at one another….
I have no idea what this photo is, but I am fascinated by it.
That palm forward is an active posture….a choice. It doesn’t represent a body in repose.
I love this and keep coming back to it.
-Jennifer Kuchenbecher Thomas, Professor of Theatre Studies, New York
‘Yes! That extended hand can be interpreted in any number of ways. Her face does not add any more. The woman on the far right seems to be . . . Not-having-it. And . . . Why are these two the only ones in a darker color?’
-Ivonne Vidal Pizarro, Dr of Neuroscience, Yoga Teacher & Extraordinary Mother, Taipei, Taiwan
‘The pose looks slightly awkward. The woman on the left looks starry eyed and the other one oblivious. It seems the romantic one is extending her hand to the other. Maybe she took her friend’s hand, maybe not. It’s not clear what’s happening. I get the impression something has been said between them just before the camera shot this.’
-Randy Bryan Bigham, Fashion Historian, USA
I think the one on the left is saying “I told you we couldn’t get out of participating” to the other who is reluctantly amused. The hand proffered to her friend to draw her in to? There is certainly a sense of complicity…
-Elspeth Hough, Policy Analyst, Edinburgh
My 2 cents… I see two women sharing a secret that doesn’t require words. There’s a very obvious affection between them.
-Crystal Freeman, Georgia, USA
My first thought was they were more than just friends but after seeing the detailed close up, they seem to be having one of those moments where nonverbal communication shows their friendship. I’d say it says something to the effect, “I told you…” while the other responds, “umhm.”
-Aniria Medrano Turney, Actress and Comic, Tampa, Florida
‘A conspiratorial exchange’
-Becky Quinton, Curator, Glasgow
And of course – I had to get some silliness:
“I told you the invitation said ‘wear something white’!”
-Norry Wilson, Lost Glasgow
And from my very own Auntie Cindy in California:
They’re saying “Can you believe they wore white to BAFTA?”
And the classic…
Chat-up lines… Ah’ thought ah’d hurd them all, but see yon wee nyaff back ther’? He told me he wiz an ‘under-appreciated genius’! Jist fancy that!
-Our own Professor Bruce Peter!
So despite some nonsense – I was happy that so many saw the camaraderie I did, and even though others weren’t sure, no one said they saw it as a purely negative exchange between the women.
It is also important to view this photo in the context of others in the album, and particularly a rather romantic shot of the women from behind, as we imagine them joined together in sororal* affection. They stand in the same order as the other photo – sans Mackintosh – as if they have just turned as one to gaze at the sublime landscape.
The Immortals: Frances MacDonald, Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Katherine Cameron, Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald, ca. 1893. Collection: GSA DC004/9
And it’s also a divine portrait of their dresses – but that’s a subject for another post!
The rest of the photos show the friends having a wonderful weekend together, and in that context, as well as with a closer examination of the particular photo in question, I do hope that the interpretation that it depicts a ‘frisson’ between Macdonald and Keppie can be laid to rest. It is one of many that show the warmth of friendship this group obviously had. Friendship, and as this image below shows, fun – not without a touch of humour.
The Immortals: Katherine Cameron, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Janet Aitken, John Keppie, Agnes Raeburn, Jessie Keppie, Frances Macdonald, Herbert MacNair, Margaret Macdonald, ca. 1893. Collection: GSA DC004/9
*(n.b. Spellcheck doesn’t know this word, but it knows fraternal! Oh, irony.)
‘The Wassail’, 1900. Oil-painted gesso on hessian and scrim, set with twine, glass beads, thread, mother-of- pearl, and tin leaf; 158.2 x 462 cm. Collection: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, E.1981.177.1-3. Original Location: Ladies Luncheon Room, Miss Cranston’s tea rooms, Ingram Street, Glasgow. Provenance: Removed from the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1971.
“Just now, we are working on two large panels for the frieze… Miss Margaret Macdonald is doing one and I am doing the other. We are working them together and that makes the work very pleasant.”-Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Hermann Muthesius, July 1900
A bit of a longer post today where I thought I might share some of the research I’ve done on Mackintosh & Macdonald’s gesso panels, and especially The Wassail in honour of it being Twelfth Night. If you are in a hurry, you can click here to jump to where I tell you what this lovely work represents. But if you’ve got a few minutes, read on to hear about the history of these beautiful and fascinating works of art.
When locals hear my (somewhat diluted) American accent for the first time, they ask me ‘what brought ye to Glasgow’? I usually answer ‘Charles Rennie Mackintosh’, but in truth, it was just as much Margaret Macdonald, and the work they created together.
It’s been over a decade since I moved to our dear green place to study, and my earliest research was focused on the Mackintosh-Macdonald collaborative projects, especially for Kate Cranton’s tearooms. I am beyond thrilled that the Willow is finally getting the conservation work it so desperately needs, and also very excited to see the work Glasgow Museums is undertaking to install the long-dismantled Oak Room at the V&A Dundee, and, hopefully, to reconstruct the Ladies Lunchroom at the Ingram Street Tearoom (I’ve been unable to get any confirmation this will happen for the Mackintosh 150 exhibit this year, but my fingers are crossed). The two large gesso panels that were made for this room, The May Queen by Macdonald and The Wassail by Mackintosh (his only gesso work), now hang side by side in the Kelvingrove. This was a necessity due to the available space in the museum, however they were made to hang across from each other, and I hope that at some point we will see them this way again. But why does this matter?
Designed in the year of their marriage, the Ladies Luncheon Room at Miss Cranston’s Tearooms at Ingram Street was the first interior that Mackintosh and Macdonald worked on together. Kate Cranston, being a professional woman herself, envisaged creating a space where ladies would feel more comfortable conducting business and leisure (away from the affairs, and perhaps gazes, of men). The feminine scheme of the room, particularly in color (largely white, lavenders, and pinks), but most certainly in the elegant female figures depicted in the gesso panels, reflected the intended patrons of the space. Like most of these spaces, it is unknown whether the rooms were designed around the panels, or vice-versa. Probably it was a combination—an overall scheme that harmonized the two. With Mackintosh interested in creating a gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), it is to be expected that each and every component of the room had a specific place and significance. Macdonald was a fitting collaborator for this commission—being an independent woman artist with a history of collaborative work with her sister Frances—and created a significant component of the scheme.
The White Dining Room (Ladies Luncheon Room), Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearoom, 1900 Reconstruction for the 1996 “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” exhibition. Collection of Glasgow Museums, acquired in 1971.
The room comprised the front of the main floor of the tearooms, and was separated from the narrow entrance hall by a mid-height screen. The walls were paneled silver and white to a height of ten feet, and the gesso panels sat opposite each other in the upper third of the east and west walls. A bank of windows stretched along the north wall, allowing natural light to reflect off the white and silver walls below the panels. The color, in combination with the natural light, created a gentle and serene environment for quiet conversation. The dining furniture was of dark wood, with long tables and high-backed chairs arranged to emphasize the horizontal length of the space. The elongation of the furniture and the interior was reflected in the elongation of the forms in the gesso panels.
The gesso panels in the frieze are perhaps the most significant aspects of this room. The couple crafted these first panels together in the busy months before their August, 1900 marriage, while simultaneously setting up their own flat at 120 Mains Street, Glasgow, and making arrangements to install their exhibit at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in October. In a letter to Hermann Muthesius dated 12th July, 1900, now in the collection of the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, Mackintosh reported:
I am not nearly done with “Miss Cranstons” yet it has involved a great lot of work. Just now we are working at two large panels for the frieze 15 feet long x 5 [feet] 3 ins [sic] high… We have set ourselves a very large task as we are slightly modelling and then colouring and setting the jewels of different colours.
The White Dining Room (Ladies Luncheon Room), Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearoom, 1900 Reconstruction for the 1996 “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” exhibition. Collection of Glasgow Museums, acquired in 1971.
Before they were installed at Ingram Street, the gesso panels were shown at the Eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition. The May Queen and The Wassail were arguably experimental in their construction, and may have proved fragile on their journey to Vienna and back, particularly because of their scale. The linear designs were not painted but constructed of twine pinned to the canvas in an almost haphazard fashion, with glass beads, shell, tin, and painted and modeled plaster “jewels”, almost an inch in relief, fixed to the surface. All of Macdonald’s subsequent panels are much lower in relief, and the linear designs are made of piped plaster instead of twine.
A conservator removing pink and green paint from ‘The May Queen’ ca. 1995. Image courtesy Glasgow Museums.
The May Queen and The Wassail remained in situ after Cranston sold all of her tea rooms and retired in 1918-19. They were salvaged from the building in 1971, but they did not, unfortunately, escape unscathed: while the tea rooms remained open under different management, but with respect for their special character, until 1950, after this they declined and were terribly abused by overpainting under various other businesses such as a souvenir shop. Glasgow Museums Curator Alison Brown related to me in a 2007 interview: “The room paneling had at least seven layers of different white and cream paints—so that gives you an idea of how the rooms were treated.” Both The May Queen and The Wassail were painted in the same colors: creamywhite faces with poorly repainted features, the string painted chocolate brown, with the golden background over-painted a jade green and the roses and flowers colored in pink. The rooms were dismantled and saved in 1970. The damage was fortunately reversible and the paintings were painstakingly cleaned and conserved in 1995, and The Ladies Luncheon Room was reconstructed for the 1996 Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibit which toured the United States, returning the eye of the global art world to the work of the Glasgow Style.
The Wassail depicts six female figures: two at center, with their heads inclined towards each other, flanked by two more figures at each side. Like Mackintosh’s decoration for the Buchanan Street rooms, these figures are not fully formed, and seem to emerge from a vinelike decorative pattern reminiscent of Japanese design. By contrast, The May Queen is a more complicated composition. Five women are depicted, and their stylized robes make them appear more fully formed than those in The Wassail. The Queen is at center in a teardropshaped garment, faerie wings inscribed in linear decoration at her back. The figures at left and right stand like ladies-in-waiting, holding garlands of flowers between them which span horizontally in front of and behind the Queen. New shoots of vine spring forth at their feet, and flowers dot the canvas in a random pattern. The contrasting angles and curves in the contours of the design, as well as the women’s faces and kimono-like garments, are reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints. Although symmetrical in design, Macdonald’s composition is looser than Mackintosh’s. There is energy in The May Queen that reflects the birth of spring, while the stillness of The Wassail suggests winter’s death; they work in unison to convey this cycle.
‘The May Queen’, 1900. Oil-painted gesso on hessian and scrim, set with twine, glass beads, thread, motherof- pearl, and tin leaf; 158.4 x 457 cm. Collection: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, E.1981.177.1-3. Original Location: Ladies Luncheon Room, Miss Cranston’s tea rooms, Ingram Street, Glasgow. Provenance: Removed from the Ingram Street Tea Rooms, 1971.
The original oppositional placement of panels suggests a dialogue. Across from each other, they subtly encourage a discourse between these two representations of festivals that, like the panels, signify opposite celebration/worship times of the year. The May Queen is derived from May-Day celebrations, held on May 1st, whereby a young girl (a virgin) is chosen to be Queen for the day, and celebrants dance with her about a Maypole (a phallus) to celebrate the return of spring; as such, this event can be viewed as a fertility rite. It is possible, too, that Macdonald’s image is directly related to a poem by a favorite poet of hers, Tennyson, also titled “The May Queen”. The refrain reads:
But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
The Wassail is not as easy to interpret, as there is no direct festival related to it, and no obvious signifiers in the image of what wassail is or means. The word comes from the Old English “wæs hæil” which means “your health”, and was used as a toast. Later, it came to be the name for the liquor, usually a spiced wine or ale, drunk at Christmas or Twelfth Night Celebrations. Through this, it also became identified as the custom of drinking this libation, usually from a special wooden bowl. Finally, it is a carol, a song to be sung at the event of “wassailing”. Thus wassail is many things—a salutation, a drink, a custom, and ultimately, a celebration—which might be fitting for a tea room atmosphere, were it not for the incongruous aspect of wassail being an alcoholic drink, which is at odds with a temperance tea room.
There is also no obvious representation of a drink, a salutation, or a celebration in Mackintosh’s panel. It conveys a very quiet and staid atmosphere, as the two central figures mirror each other, heads bowed and eyes closed, within a cocoon-like arrangement of vines. The composition of each of the figures is closed; the sentinels to the right and left have their robes folded close about them as they gaze at two figures at center. Two butterflies, one on either side of the sleeping figures, foreshadow the blossoming of these forms come spring. It is at odds with the idea of festival.
However there is one other possible meaning for wassail which may explain the quiet composition—wassailing was also performed by farmers for the fertility of plants and animals, by either drinking to their health, or pouring a libation into the earth. In fact, an 1895 text by Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The evil eye: an account of this ancient and widespread superstition, speaks of the “old Christmas Custom of wassailing the apple trees” (and for fans of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage, you might have seen the episode where this custom is still in effect!). This idea has roots in Celtic and Germanic traditions of Yule, or winter festivals, that represented the death of the God, or the male aspect of the earth, whose seeds lie dormant in the land until the return of the Goddess in the spring. The red “lollipop trees” in Mackintosh’s composition could, in fact, be seen as representations of apple trees, signifying both the cider drink itself, and the plants which are wassailed each winter, the women at either side coming to offer libations for the trees to awaken and grow. Thus The Wassail can be seen as a visual representation of winter’s sleep, of life lying dormant, the opposite of the blossoming of spring found in the vibrancy of The May Queen.
These panels are exemplary of interests in the Celtic Revival of the time, but extend them to British heritage in general: May-Day celebrations and “wassailing” are particularly English traditions, with roots in Saxon and Nordic cultures. In Scotland, May-Day was known as Beltane, one of the four ancient quarter-days, and was (and still is) celebrated differently with the lighting of the bael-fire, or bonfire; and the most famous of the wassail carols, ‘Here we come a-wassailling’, is from England*, the birthplace of Macdonald (an aside: when I teach this subject to my students, it is only the English, American and Canadian ones who know the word or indeed the song). In this manner, both themes suggest Macdonald’s heritage, for although Scottish in ancestry, she was English in birth and upbringing. But that both found such subjects appealing is clear; one does not have to dig very deeply to find a communion with nature and the metaphysical, clear in the abundance of natural motifs and otherworldly females in both Mackintosh and Macdonald’s work.
As you can see there is a rich and considered history behind these beautiful works of art, that includes not just what they portray, but where and how they were displayed. So while I am very happy that we can still gaze upon them together in the Kelvingrove, I hope that in future they will be reinstated in their original configuration, so that they may gaze upon each other as they were intended.
*Correction: a previous version said ‘North of England’ without clarifying that while the song originates there, Macdonald was born in the Midlands, just a bit further south. This does not dilute the over-arching point about this being and English tradition, versus Scottish.
If you are interested to learn more about the tearooms, you can also download an article I’ve written on the Willow from RADAR, the GSA research repository. – Robyne
‘Drawing for a New Year’s Card’, 1890–1928. Graphite with touches of gold pigment, 12 7/8 × 5 1/4 in. (32.7 × 13.4 cm). The Met, New York: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1954; 56.646.2 #Mackintosh150
‘Drawing for a New Year’s Card’, 1890–1928. Graphite with touches of gold pigment, 12 7/8 × 5 1/4 in. (32.7 × 13.4 cm). The Met, New York: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1954; 56.646.2 https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/362312
Glasgow is looking forward to 2018, for it marks the 150th birthday of one of it’s most famous sons, our own Charles Rennie Mackintosh. While he was born the 7th of June, we will be celebrating all year long with a wide variety of activities, not the least of which is a new major exhibition at Glasgow Museums, the Kelvingrove.
While we certainly plan to get in on the festivities at the GSA, our Mackintosh building will not re-open until 2019 – a project which keeps us all incredibly busy! So to celebrate in a small way, the research team has decided that we can at least take a moment each day to share a favourite bit of Mackintosh, which we will do at our new Twitter handle @CRMackintosh365.
And what better way to launch our year that with this lovely card from Charles & Margaret, now in the collection of The Met in New York? The Met suggest a rather wide date range of 1890-1928, the year of his death; but I’d comfortably narrow this to ca. 1900-1906, the year of their marriage and the period in which they collaborated on very similar motifs in interior designs for tea rooms, etc. I would have loved to have been on their festive card list!
We hope you’ll see some old friends and find some new favourites throughout the year.
Having seen the works in the catalogue, the emotional response I had upon entering the small preview exhibition was rather unexpected. I was reminded of walking into the library for the first time post-fire: the punch in the gut, the lump in the throat, the tearing eyes. And perhaps most surprisingly, while standing in front of GSA alumni Martin Boyce’s wonderful ‘Spook School’ piece, a faint scent of smoke. A smell mostly long-vanished from the Mack, yet those of us who frequent its halls for the project still catch the occasional unexpected whiff.
Rachael Purse contemplates Martin Boyce’s work.
This was an experience shared by some of the contributing artists, as GSA alumni Chantal Joffe noted:
“Receiving the box was quite upsetting, like receiving the ashes of a dead friend. The charcoal was softer than I’m used to, it was hard to get an edge. As I drew, it released the smell of the fire.”
Rachael and I are in London for research, but we timed the trip to take in the auction, which will no doubt be very exciting. But from an academic perspective, it is bittersweet as this will be the only time this collection will be exhibited together before dispersed to fortunate private collectors – though there is always the hope that a savvy public collection will bid on some of these pieces, which are all rather reasonably priced, if you’ve got that kind of budget. My own lottery ticket didn’t come in, so sadly the Grayson Perry urn, poignantly preserving a bit of library-charcoal, won’t be coming home with me.
Grayson Perry, ‘Art is dead Long live Art’. Charcoal from the Mackintosh Library in glazed ceramic. 21 x 10cm.
As a body of work, the lot is worth a much more considered analysis than I’ll offer in this quick post, but the range of responses is truly impressive. From Anish Kapoor‘s minimal encasement of an unaltered fragment in rich red Perspex to Tacita Dean‘s dreamy charcoal drawings, the variation in approaches is reflective of the manifold artistic practices taught at the Glasgow School of Art.
One GSA alumni, Alison Watt, offered and exquisitely minimalist canvas that to my eye looks very like an elegant detail from a piece of Mackintosh furniture. The work reflects the loss Watt felt, as many of us did, at the fire:
“I cried when I heard of the fire. The Glasgow School of Art has a particular hold over those who studied there, not only through its remarkable physical presence, but also as an idea. The idea of creativity coming from the wreckage resonated with me. I delicately shaved small slivers from the charred wood and ground them to a powder mixed with Payne’s Grey and Burnt Sienna oil colour, creating a particularly intense black. It’s a darkness which is hard to define.”
Alison Watt ‘Deep Within the Heart of Me’. Oil & charcoal from the Mackintosh Library on canvas. 46 x 46cm.
Some pieces are not such emotional responses, even irreverent, and I was particularly delighted by Joseph Kosuth’s ‘O.M.C.’ – of which he said:
The title ‘O.M.C’ signifies ‘One Mackintosh Chair’, which is a semi-ironic reference to that well-known early work of mine. So, potentially, the charcoal used in the drawing is the remains of the chair being depicted.”
Joseph Kosuth ‘O.M.C’. Charcoal from the Mackintosh Library on paper. 92.5 x 79.5cm.
Referencing his iconic 1965 ‘One and Three Chairs‘, a piece that opened my young art student mind to semiotics and conceptual art, it rang a doubly personal note.
But perhaps my most favourite piece – and surely I am biased here – is Sir Peter Blake’s velvety composite image of the library before and after the fire. The classic Annan photo hovers at the surface, in which the artist has employed his charcoal.
Sir Peter Blake, ‘Untitled’. Inkjet graphite and charcoal from the Mackintosh Library on paper. 57.7 x 71cm.
The caption reads:
“Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the Library at Glasgow School of Art, both before and after the fire (his cravat is drawn in charcoal from the burnt Library).”
While my fingers are crossed for a massive return on the time and heart these artists invested and gave us, I confess a bit of sadness thinking these pieces will not be seen together again. Perhaps they might be gathered once more in another 100 years, when even the reconstructed areas of the Mack will again be viewed as historic cultural icons.
And here we go…
EDIT: What an exciting event! The final results can be viewed by clicking here (lots 240-264), but a quick & dirty calculation shows that the auction realised just under £570,000 for us! Deepest thanks to all the artists who gave time, care, and effort to support the Glasgow School of Art.
O YE, all ye that walk in Willowwood… that walk with hollow faces burning white…
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Willow Tea Rooms (1903), Glasgow
Every 15 November, those of us who are devotees of the Pre-Raphaelites celebrate #PRBDay in the blogosphere. Previously I’ve written about ‘The Myth of Pre-Raphaelite Dress’ and Holman Hunt’s sartorial experiments. This year I’m going to stray slightly from the subject of this blog to share an excerpt of my research on the Willow Tea Rooms here in Glasgow, the decorative theme of which was inspired by my favourite Rossetti poem: Willowwood. The tea room, opened in 1903, was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and takes its name from the street upon which it sits, Sauchiehall, which means ‘alley of the willows’ in Gaelic. Mackintosh remodelled an extant building and in addition to the main dining room, the upper floors contained a smoking and billiards room for gentlemen, while the crowning jewel of the Willow, the Salon de Luxe – a lavender and silver toned dining room, intended to appeal to female clientele – took pride of place on the second floor of the building, taking full advantage of the Northern light from the Mackintosh’s new stained-glass bow window.
Charles Rennie and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ‘Salon de Luxe’ at the Willow Tea Rooms (1903)
For the interior of this dazzling room, Mackintosh enlisted the aid of his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Specifically, Macdonald crafted a gesso panel for this room, arguably amongst her most beautiful, titled after the first line in the third sonnet of Rossetti’s cycle of four, O Ye, All Ye That Walk In Willowwood. The Salon de Luxe is a quintessential example of how the Mackintoshes engaged with Symbolist practices in the creation of a gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. The panel may be viewed as a narrative key to understanding the space’s meaning.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ‘O Ye All Ye That Walk in Willowwood’, 1902, gesso and glass beads, 1645 x 585 mm. Collection: Glasgow Museums, E.2001.6
What follows is an excerpt from a longer essay focused on the Salon de Luxe. But for this post I’m going to focus on the analysis of the poems. Literary analysis isn’t something I often get a chance to tackle, and I enjoyed writing this a great deal. Unfamiliar readers may wish to spend some time with the original poems, considering them on your own before reading my interpretation.
Rossetti’s Willowwood
The ‘Willowwood’ sonnets form the heart of a larger work by Rossetti, The House of Life. Rossetti scholar Jerome McGann tells us ‘The House of Life project grew out of the composition of these four poems in December 1868’ and argues that the Willowwood sonnets are a sort of miniaturized version of The House of Life, both expressing ‘a problem about love and the hope of its fulfilment.’[i] There are varied interpretations of the sonnets and of the work as a whole, but in Rossetti’s own words: ‘I should wish to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions; and in carrying out my scheme of the House of Life (if ever I do so) shall try to put in action a complete ‘dramatis personae’ of the soul.’[ii] On other interpretations, McGann observes: ‘[e]veryone agrees, however, that the ambiguities all pivot around [Rossetti’s] complex love-commitments, and especially his commitments to his wife Elizabeth, on one hand, who died in early 1862, and his friend’s wife Jane Morris, on the other.’ The sonnets, told in first-person narrative, suggest that the speaker is Rossetti himself; to clarify the discussion here, the three main characters in this drama will be referred to in the following manner: The Poet (the narrator), the Lost Love (the vision of a lost love), and Love (personified).
The first sonnet opens with The Poet sitting with personified Love by a ‘woodside well.’ Upon Love’s touching of his lute, The Poet recalls the voice of his Lost Love, and begins to weep. His tears fall into the well, and the rippling of the water creates a vision. With the sweep of Love’s wing-feathers touching the water, the vision of his lost love rises to meet him, and The Poet leans down to touch his lips with hers on the surface of the water. This image is quite important, as it is symbolically represented in the Willowwood panel, as shall be seen.
Here, Rossetti establishes important contrasting themes for the rest of the work: passion and sorrow, love and loss. ‘Willowwood I’ also serves as an introduction for iconography in the work, and as a reminder of Rossetti’s influences, chiefly Italian art and poetry such as Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova, which is similarly centred on the narrator’s pining for an unattainable Love, mediated by encounters and discourses with personified Love. Rossetti comes to this theme repeatedly in his poetry and art, such as in his famous Beata Beatrix, appropriating Christian iconography and transforming it into his own symbolic conventions to relate an imagined moment from the Vita Nuova. In an 1873 letter to William Graham, for whom he painted a replica, Rossetti explained Beata Beatrix in the following manner:
The picture must of course be viewed not as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice, but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfiguration… and in sign of the supreme change, the radiant bird, a messenger of death, drops the white poppy between her hands.[iii]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Beata Beatrix’, c.1864-70. oil on canvas. Collection: Tate Britain.
Thus instead of a white dove or a red rose, symbols that are more familiar Christian signifiers, he appropriates the bird/flower iconography of the god/virgin relationship, and creates a red bird/white poppy messenger of death. The symbolic language is familiar, yet not, like a different iconographic dialect.
Rossetti’s twisting of iconography appears in both his painting and poetry, foreshadowing later Symbolist interventions. Take for example, the central component of the well in Willowwood (which we shall see in the central formal element of the gesso panel, the green oval). Symbolically, wells are meeting as well as drinking places, which is an intriguing consideration for a tea room theme. In ‘Willowwood I’, we witness two metaphysical meetings, as seen through the gaze of the poet: first, with Love, whose eyes he meets in the waters below, and second, with the Lost Love who comes forth from the reflected eyes of Love in the water. The well itself is a liminal space, a site for The Poet to encounter his Lost Love, whether she is the spectre of a dead woman, or simply someone out of his reach. Both images suggest a moment between the physical and spiritual, suggestive of sensuality and desire through the encounter with Love and the kiss.
The second sonnet opens with the words ‘And now Love Sang’, which would seem to suggest we are about to hear his song. Instead, Rossetti makes us wait, and rather describes the nature of the song, as well as the rising action of the drama that occurs while Love sings, indicated by the first words of the last line of the sonnet ‘And still Love sang.’ Rossetti describes the song in complex terms, and while it has been argued that these lines may somehow reference souls waiting for the ‘second coming,’ [iv] there is precedent for another more esoteric theme here, that of reincarnation. In 1854, Rossetti wrote the poem ‘Sudden Light’ while vacationing with Elizabeth Siddal in Hastings:
I HAVE been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. 10
Has this been thus before? And shall not thus time’s eddying flight Still with our lives our love restore In death’s despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?[v]
There can be little question that reincarnation is the theme of this poem, signalled by the opening of each verse: ‘I have been here before… you have been mine before… has this been thus before?’ In Willowwood, Love’s song is akin to one ‘disused souls’ would sing, ‘meshed with half-remembrance’ when their ‘new birthday tarries long’; in other words when they are waiting to reincarnate, and filled with fading memories of their former life. This interpretation is especially poignant when considering the subsequent lines about the dumb throng, the mournful forms which emerge from the wood, who The Poet recognizes as their former selves, ‘The shades of those our days that had no tongue.’ They could be memories, but could also be shadows of past lives. All of this happens in the same moment as the kiss upon the water, at which these shades cry out in longing as we are returned to the song of love, which is the subject of the next sonnet.
This third sonnet is the most important for the purposes of this study, as its first line is the title of Macdonald’s panel. This sonnet is actually Love’s song, but rather than being a ‘romantic’ ballad sung by Love as troubadour, it is a mournful song that offers a poignant message: pining for lost love is fruitless, and will bring naught but more pain.
Here is an appropriate place to address a question that is perhaps the most important in interpreting both Rossetti’s poem and Macdonald’s work: what, in a larger sense, is a willowwood? In a literal sense, it is the wood of willows next to the well in which the action takes place. But willowwood also carries with it several symbolic connotations. The associations of the willow with sorrow and mourning are evident. In an agricultural light, willows are found near riverbanks, and their roots are excellent for preventing soil erosion. Thus, they are associated with water (also a signifier of continuity), which is represented by the well in the poem. It is also an ancient medicinal plant. The bark and leaves are rich in salicin, a natural glucoside akin to the active ingredient in aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid. The most common way of utilizing the willow’s healing properties was to boil its bark in water and drink it; in other words, to make tea. Finally, Willows were also considered guardians, and planted around cemeteries to keep spirits bound. This could apply to the ‘shades’ in ‘Willowwood II’ that manifest themselves each next to a tree, but have no voice to speak with, and which do not approach the action of the scene.
The place that is Willowwood is defined by all of these associations, and also by the action ascribed by Love’s song. Those who ‘walk in Willowwood’ are those who mourn yet long (‘hollow faces burning bright’), those who have been left behind in ‘soul-struck widowhood’, whose existence has become ‘one lifelong night’. This last could have a double meaning: night, as in the darkness, but also as in the time when spirits can be seen (and perhaps even touched). The song goes on to suggest that these souls cultivate their sorrow in vain, those who ‘wooed your last hope lost’ and ‘in vain invite your lips to that their unforgotten food’. This is a direct reference to The Poet’s action of kissing the vision in the well, which the shades—manifestations of the lovers—lament in longing. Thus Willowwood is a place of mourning, if not a place of the dead, where yearning souls (living or not) dwell, those who attempt in vain to be with those lost to them.
The sextet that follows offers even more insight into the painful nature of Willowwood:
Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood, With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red: Alas! if ever such a pillow could Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,—
Here we again find Rossetti’s colour symbolism: red and white used interchangeably for love, passion, life and death. This is reinforced by the rhyme scheme: the second line of the octet ends ‘burning white’ while the second line of the sextet ends ‘burning red’; and each have their own associations within their verse: ‘white’ rhymes with ‘night’, ‘invite’, and ‘light’; and ‘red’ rhymes with ‘dead’. The word associations within the rhyme serve a similar function to the visual symbolism discussed above in Beata Beatrix, to connote colour and words in a crafting a reinvented system of signification.
Like these plants, dwellers in Willowwood are weakened by their tears and burning with their rage and passion. Also interesting to note is the bitter nature of each of these plants: spurge is an invasive plant that consumes and takes over wherever it takes root, and bloodwort was used medicinally to induce vomiting (spurge carries within it a milky white sap, while the red roots of bloodwort were used to make dyes). Thus in a beautiful crafting of language and imagery, Rossetti uses the natural plant-life found on an English riverbank as a tool to describe the bitter emotion involved in this sort of longing. Willowwood here is not just a place of mourning, but the mourning itself made manifest in the bitter banks of which Love laments that one cannot ‘steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead’ (and here, one cannot help but think of Elizabeth Siddal, who steeped herself in sleep with laudanum, then died from it).
The closing lines of the sonnet/song carry the potent message that love wishes to relate:
Better all life forget her than this thing, That Willowwood should hold her wandering!’
But far from offering closure, Love has planted the seed of hope in the midst of his song: the last line of the octet, in the middle of his song, he declares: ‘Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!’ Recall its rhymes, which when said together say, not coincidentally, ‘white night invite light’. This promise of light foreshadows the ambiguously hopeful ending of the final sonnet.
The cycle closes with a description of the end of the encounter, and an enigmatic image of hope. In the final sonnet, Rossetti analogizes the ending of the kiss as two clinging roses who, having withstood the ‘wind’s wellaway’ or Love’s lamentation, at the end of the day drop their leaves that had been loosened ‘where the heart-stain glows’. The opening line of the octet is also a double-entendre recalling the action of the second sonnet, the ‘meeting rose and rose’ (and the importance of rose symbolism to the Mackintoshes is well-known). The vision/phantom of Lost Love fades back, ‘drowned’ from view, and The Poet reveals uncertainty that he will ever see Her again. Yet at the end, Rossetti offers a hopeful twist: As The Poet takes a last draught of his Lost Love’s presence, Love leans forward and graces him with a blessing through his touch, his ‘moan of pity and grace’, and finally, in a potent visual image, moves his head ‘till both our heads were in his aureole.’ It is rather ambiguous as to whom the ‘both’ refers to, Love and The Poet, or The Poet and his Lost Love, but a potent case could be made for the latter if one recalls the themes of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the repetition of trinities. By encompassing both of the lovers’ heads in his aureole, Love joins the three of them, gracing them with his blessed halo and making profane love sacred. It is this interpretation of the Willowwood, as a place of unrequited love, where sorrow and longing mingle passionately with longing and hope that provides the most compelling interpretation of Macdonald’s Willowwood, and the Salon de Luxe.
…
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ‘O Ye All Ye That Walk in Willowwood’
The Willowwood panel is a symbolic illustration of Rossetti’s poems. It is in fact a continuous narrative of the vision of the Lost Love in the well, and the shades of her wandering the wood. The green oval at centre is the well, and the face that hovers inside it is that of the Lost Love. The similar features and hairstyles, plus an understanding of the poem, tell us that the other two figures are her shades, walking in a circular fashion about the well, inside the wood that is represented by the rhythmic gesso lines on the surface. The Poet and Love are also present, however. A ghostly hand hovers on the surface of the well; The Poet touching the surface of the water. The ripple this creates is in the form of a rose—this rose, along with the others found throughout the composition, denotes the presence of Love. However, the particular rose that is beneath the hand serves a dual function—it is positioned just over the Spirit’s lips, and is therefore also representative of the meeting of lips—the kiss—described in ‘Willowwood I’.
…
Surely it was a simple bit of logic which moved the Mackintoshes to borrow from Rossetti’s willow-themed poetry; but the Willowwood sonnets also embraced perhaps the most idealistic motif of the Mackintoshes’ life and work: love. There is a melancholy hopefulness to the theme, that in some other place we shall find those we love, that they wait, and that we should not linger on their loss. In the context of the design scheme, the Salon de Luxe is like a liminal space; somewhere not quite otherworldly, but also hardly typical of a public dining room: a chamber of glittering silver and lavender juxtaposed against the grey city beyond the windows; the musical clinking of china and whisper of voices versus the noise of the street. If the Willowwood panel depicts Rossetti’s sonnets, and the theme extended about the room in mirrors and leaded glass (like water, reflective surfaces), then the room itself becomes the wood in which she dwells. Her accompanying shades are the patrons who come for tea, passing through the fantastical doors to the otherworldly spaces, touching their lips to their libations as The Poet who drank from the well. The Salon de Luxe is, symbolically, Willowwood.
____
[i] Jerome J. McGann, ed., The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [Rossetti Archive] (Freely distributed by IATH and the NINES consortium under a Creative Commons License, 2008), http://www.rossettiarchive.org/index.html. Comprised of sonnets written between the years of 1847-1870, the text ranges in size depending on its publication date, from the first sixteen-sonnet sequence published in the Fortnightly Review in March 1869, under the title ‘Of Life, Love, and Death: Sixteen Sonnets’; then subsequently added to and restructured until the final version of forty-five were published March 1, 1870.
Hamo & Agatha Thornycroft, Dress (possibly a Wedding Gown), 1884. Striped washing silk from Liberty, with hand-smocked and gathered sleeves, lined with cotton. Victoria & Albert Museum, Given by Mrs W.O. Manning [T.171-1973].
This is a post I wasn’t going to make – it was in the ‘save it for the book’ category. However, one of my keen-eyed students from my Artistic Dress class at the GSA pointed out to me that some of my research had been posted to the V&A online catalogue – with no credit to me. Now, before the gasps of outrage form, let me say that I am fine with this, and use it as an excuse to share one of my favourite stories from my thesis. It might prove an interesting (hopefully) insight into how research of this type makes an impact, even if small.
The research relates to a dress (above) that has been viewable in the online collection for some time (its condition is too fragile for sustained display). It was one of the first dresses I identified to study, and has been referenced in other literature in this area. Another wonderful white gown, it is one of those specimens often identified as Aesthetic Dress, and it does somewhat walk in that rather murky area. When I first researched this dress, and at the time of my PhD completion (early 2012), the V&A catalogue said very little about it, but credited it as being a Liberty gown, designed by Hamo Thornycroft. Now, the object information has been updated with information I discovered in the Thornycroft archive at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which I happily passed on to the curators. I did this because they allowed me to come and examine the dress when it was still being mounted for display in the Cult of Beauty exhibit, and after a chat with the Senior Textile Conservator Frances Hartog, I realised that they were not aware of the relevant letters. Interestingly, Hartog’s own observations on the gown were in line with the story I learned from the Thornycroft letters (more below). The marriage of research and technical study is a wonderful thing! As is academic generosity.
I shall cease being vague, and excerpt the relevant material from my thesis, as it was one of my favourite stories to write. Probably because it is a wee bit of a romance! Read on…
Unknown photographer, Hamo Thornycroft as Proteus from ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’, ca. 1880s. Photograph, Thornycroft Archive, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Unknown photographer, Agatha Cox (later Thornycroft), n.d. Photograph, Thornycroft Archive, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
The Thornycroft Gown:
a Liberty Dress?
In 1884, the same year [that E.W.] Godwin began the ‘Art Dress’ department at Liberty, the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft and his wife Agatha created what is for me the quintessential example of an Artistic Dress. According to their daughter (Mrs W.O. Manning), who donated the dress to the V&A in 1973, this was Agatha’s wedding gown.
Both Hamo and Agatha had a well-established interest in both historic costume as well as dress reform, judging from photographs. One photo shows a young Hamo dressed as Proteus from Two Gentleman of Verona (perhaps for a fancy dress party or a tableau vivant); and another photo shows an even younger Agatha as the Queen of Hearts. But costume balls were a popular pastime for many Victorians; more interesting is a photo of the couple taken in 1884, probably shortly after their marriage [below]. Hamo wears the sort of comfortable outdoors attire that Godwin and [Walter] Hamilton spoke of… checked breeches tucked in woollen socks, a loose comfortable coat, and a short-brimmed cap. Agatha wears what was certainly a ‘rational’ ensemble: a loosely-fitted walking dress (comfortable but not straying too far for the fashionable silhouette), and a long mantle-like overdress topped with a shorter cape that ties artistically at her throat. From her posture and the fit of the outfit it is plain to see she wears neither corset nor bustle or crinoline; one imagines she has chosen the woollen combinations promoted by dress reform societies. It is a comfortable and candid portrait of the young couple.
Unknown Photographer, Hamo & Agatha Thornycroft, 1884. Photograph, Thornycroft Archive, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
The Thornycrofts’ affection is plain in a series of letters written by Agatha that relate to the Artistic Dress she wore for her wedding. [At the time of writing this thesis], the gown… was labelled by the V&A as a Liberty dress, designed by Hamo Thornycroft. Specifically, the object file list[ed] ‘Liberty & Co. Ltd’ as the maker, then in the summary states:
The dress was made and worn by the wife of Sir Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1926). He was a sculptor and designed it for her. They were both interested in the dress reform movement and conceived the dress in accordance with the movement’s principles so it did not restrict the waist and arms…
The sewing is not professional and the dress has been altered. The Liberty material is a thin, probably Indian, washing silk of a type that seldom survives.[1]
The information in the entry is conflicting: the maker is listed as Liberty, yet the discussion states it was made by Agatha, and designed by Hamo. It also states the sewing is not professional, which would also negate authorship of Liberty & Co. as maker.[2] This conflictive listing is possibly due to cataloguing necessities mixed with information given to the museum by Mrs Manning. However, new evidence gives us a clearer picture of how the gown came to be: there is reference to it in three letters written by Agatha, which were not accessible until their daughter left Hamo’s personal papers to the Henry Moore Institute in the 1980s.
In a letter dated Jan 1st 1884, just after their engagement, Agatha wrote to Hamo while she was staying outside of London:
Dearest. The box from Liberty caused me a great deal of surprise and delight at your kindness in sending me such a lovely present. The stuff is beautiful and it has often been my ambition to have a dress of it but I cannot help reproaching you at the same time for indulging me to such an extent… The question that arises is, how can I get it made into a wearable form? I am afraid the genius of the Tonbridge dressmakers is not sufficiently great to induce me to let them try their hands on it. But I cannot yet make up my mind on such a weighty and important subject. You see women are all alike; just as vain as one another! I have been considering already the design of the dress but I think you must help me with that. It requires great consideration…
A week later, she wrote:
I am going to get my dress made by a dress maker here, the only one I think who can carry out instructions at all near the mark. I shall keep her well under my eye which will be possible if she comes here to work. I think the conclusions we came to very satisfactory with regard to the dress the other night. I have a good idea of what it should be like. It was sweet of you to make so much trouble about it.
Then finally, on the 21st, she wrote to thank Hamo for lace and mittens he sent, and observed ‘The lace is lovely and will suit the Liberty gown.’[3] Thus these letters offer us rare insight into one way these clothes were made. It is also interesting to note that she refers to this as a ‘Liberty gown’, although it was not made by Liberty & Co., merely the fabric came from there.
The final design encompasses all the aspects of a proper Artistic Dress. It is made of fine, lightweight silk, dyed in natural colours – an off-white, with a turquoise blue stripe (now badly faded so the dress appears ivory, see detail images). One can imagine it being worn with the turquoise jewellery that was very popular with the artistic set at this time. The dress design the Thornycrofts concocted was modest yet graceful, and in fact, according to V&A Senior Textile Conservator Frances Hartog, the stitching itself is rather basic, hinting perhaps at the uncertain skill of that Tonbridge dressmaker.[4]
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The bodice has a low square neckline and is decorated only with flattering smocking that gives it a rustic charm. Wilson tells us that smocking was revived in the 1870s ‘to give movement to the sleeves and yoke, and by the 1880s it was fashionable for conventional dress.’[5] I would add to this that smocking also had a specific social significance related to both a more picturesque, romantic (and historicised) attitude; and the joy and usefulness of handicraft promoted through the Arts and Crafts movement.[6] Smocking is beautiful and useful, a kind of ornamentation of which Godwin and his followers approved; that it becomes a popular feature of Artistic Dress (and subsequently fashionable dress) is unsurprising.
The back is adorned simply with pleating and a row of functional buttons. The sleeves are fitted above and below the elbow, allowing the coveted freedom of movement. The skirt is beautifully draped in the front in a Greek style that hints at coming Edwardian fashion, while the back is gathered up to create an illusion of a soft bustle, without the added weight of a crinoline. The overall effect is an elegant gown which in its healthful and aesthetic qualities embodies all the tenets of Artistic Dress, without straying too far from the fashionable Victorian silhouette.
Thus it stands that this dress, although made from Liberty silk, is not actually a ‘Liberty & Co.’ brand or make of dress, as we might understand it today. It is an excellent example, however, of the way in which Liberty supported the home arts industry through providing materials for Artistic Dress. They were proactive and even didactic in this respect, as the next chapter’s investigation of their catalogues, reveals.
And so, the object file has been updated to reflect that the maker is actually unknown, although it does still list Liberty as a ‘maker’. I can only imagine this is for search purposes, as I doubt they are trying to credit Liberty’s, but rather flag it up for researchers due to the fabric. It might easily cause confusion, however, another reason I’m glad the notes have been updated with the letter excerpts I provided.
The V&A was incredibly generous in allowing me access to this dress – and incidentally, I always find them wonderfully helpful and open to researchers. So I can’t really be upset that the they didn’t credit me with discovering this material (and the online catalogue isn’t an appropriate space for that anyway) – because the goal of research, at least for me, isn’t glory, but furthering knowledge. (Well, maybe just a little glory. Or a steady paycheck at least.) And now, the V&A know a bit more about this wonderful specimen, and future researchers can use this material to develop their own work. And I feel pretty good about that.
Notes
[1] From the online catalogue for: Liberty & Co. Ltd. (maker), Dress (Thornycroft/Liberty), Striped washing silk, with hand-smocked and gathered sleeves, lined with cotton, ca 1885, T.171-1973, Victoria & Albert Museum, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O13850/dress/.
[2] For more on amateur and professional sewing and dressmaking at this time, see: Burman, The Culture of Sewing.
[3] Liberty & Co. Ltd. (maker), Dress (Thornycroft/Liberty).
[4] Frances Hartog, related to the author in a conversation at the Victoria & Albert Museum, March 2010.
[5] Wilson, “Away with the Corsets, On with the Shifts,” 21.
[6] For more on this, see: Parker, The Subversive Stitch; and: Janice Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries, 1880-1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (Irish Academic Press, 2007).
For Pre-Raphaelite fandom, it’s a weekend of anniversaries. Most notably, today is Pre-Raphaelite Day, which I explained a bit about last year when I wrote about The Myth of Pre-Raphaelite Dress. On this 165th anniversary of the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by a group of unruly art school students, the Pre-Raphaelite society is again calling for votes on Twitter for your favourite PRB painting. Voting is easy, just do #PRBDay! It is also worth noting that is the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Pre-Raph Society, so many congratulations!
Now, on perhaps a more bleak note, yesterday also saw a more solemn anniversary: the death of William Holman Hunt. Before we bow our heads and weep, his 1910 death meant he had quite the long party. Let’s see, born 1827… means… 83 years! (It took me far too long to do that math this morning.) Hunt is an intriguing character, and one I will confess I know too little about. In fact, when I dug into my research to get some more substantial material for this post, I was surprised to discover that he had very little mention in my PhD at all! Something I will have to rectify in the book. As such, let’s simply look at a sampling of pictures that show my own folly in setting him aside.
Whether you feel Hunt cuts a dashing figure is probably down to whether you are in to bushy beards. I think we can all agree that he at least started out somewhat reputable, as seen in this early sketch by Millais in which he sports fashionable Victorian sideburns. His cravat is neatly tied, and the only hint of ‘Maniac’ (a nickname he earned for his laughter, not necessarily his temperament) is perhaps the daring glint in his eyes.
William Holman Hunt by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt pencil with some wash, 1853 9 1/4 in. x 7 1/2 in. (235 mm x 189 mm) Purchased, 1985 Primary Collection NPG 5834
Very little has been written about Hunt and his clothes, outside how he used items he collected in his paintings. In her 2008 catalogue essay for the exhibition Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, Linda Parry examined Hunt’s keen interest in textiles from an early age, and discusses his own personal collection, some of which is now in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.[1] This collection, which included various textiles and garments including kaftans, smocks, robes, caps, sashes, and even slippers, was used for costume props, home decorations, and most notably, everyday clothing by Hunt. Two extant photographs from a sitting with Cameron on 30 June, 1864, show him in a pinstriped robe which extends to perhaps mid-calf, the stripes aligned vertically down the torso, but horizontally across the arms in the same material, and closed at the waist with a lighter toned silk sash.
Julia Margaret Cameron, William Holman Hunt in Eastern Dress (Taken on the lawn of Brent Lodge, Hendon), 1864. Albumen print, 259 x 208 mm, 10 1.4 x 8 1.4 in. National Media Museum, Bradford.
Julia Margaret Cameron, William Holman Hunt in Eastern Dress (Taken on the lawn of Brent Lodge, Hendon), 1864. Albumen print.
William Holman Hunt, Self-Portrait, 1875, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Although a black and white image, we know the robe was indigo with lighter blue or white stripes, with red trim and lining, for he painted himself in the same costume for a self-portrait he made for the prestigious Vasari Corridor at the Uffizi. For Hunt, these garments referenced the clothing of biblical times, as well as signifying his own spiritual pilgrimage. Thus in choosing the identity he wanted preserved for posterity, in both the photograph and the painting, he selected exotic clothing that may have appeared simply bohemian to the average observer, but which, for him, reflected his inner spiritual state and religious conviction.
That said, Hunt’s ensembles are a lot of fun. The more eccentric of these he wore in private or semi-private, in his studio, or amongst more unconventional friends such as Julia Margaret Cameron and her sisters at Holland Park. But he certainly ventured out in public in masculine manifestations of Artistic Dress, such as we see in a detail of Brooks’ monumental Private View of 1888.
Detail of Hunt in William Jamyn Brooks, ‘Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition’, Royal Academy, 1888, 1889. Oil on canvas, 1545 x 2715 mm, 60 7/8 x 106 7/8 in. National Portrait Gallery, London [NPG 1833].
Wearing a rather stylish fur trimmed coat, he chats animatedly amidst the social buzz… he looks like a rather charming conversationalist! I also very much like this later photo of him in a velvet coat, I only wish I could see the entire suit, as I wonder if he is also wearing Aesthetic breeches:
William Holman Hunt by Alfred James Philpott (Phillpot), for Elliott & Fry albumen cabinet card, 1896 5 3/4 in. x 3 7/8 in. (145 mm x 100 mm) image size Given by Marion Harry Spielmann, 1939 Photographs Collection NPG x11986
I’m going to believe that he is. And I’m definitely going to spend more time with the dapper and charming Hunt in future research.
EDIT: I forgot the most amazing image of Hunt, of all of them! That was me rushing to post… but look at this! Here is is re-enacting the painting of The Scapegoat. Don’t you just want to invite him to your next ‘At Home’?
William Holman Hunt re-enacting the painting of The Scapegoat.
[1] Linda Parry, “Textile Background: Cloth and Costume,” in Holman Hunt & the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008).
[2] Dakers, 20; quoting letter to Lady Constance Leslie.
I have long been bothered by the characterisation of Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald as being at odds in this photo. To my eye, the two women gaze at each other in familiarity, and although the image is even hazy in person, one can see that they are exchanging an amused glance. Keppie’s hand is not in a fist as the quote above suggests, but in an open-palmed gesture towards her friend. What is it that has made others have such a negative reading of this image?
![Hamo & Agatha Thornycroft, Dress (possibly a Wedding Gown), 1884. Striped washing silk from Liberty, with hand-smocked and gathered sleeves, lined with cotton, Victoria & Albert Museum, Given by Mrs W.O. Manning [T.171-1973].](https://robynecalvert.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/c2511-2006av6121_jpg_l.jpg)
![Detail of Hunt in William Jamyn Brooks, 'Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition', Royal Academy, 1888, 1889. Oil on canvas, 1545 x 2715 mm, 60 7/8 x 106 7/8 in. National Portrait Gallery, London [NPG 1833].](https://robynecalvert.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/b632c-hunt-detail-brooks-private-view.jpg)
Robyne Calvert 