This is Hill House near Helensburgh and it's a wonderful example of the significance and
vitality of women artists in the late 19th and early 20th century in Scotland.
And it was the shared vision of Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh
and indeed in their partnership Mackintosh said, 'I had the talent, but she had the genius.' Margaret
was one of a number of female artists who gained a considerable reputation during this period.
So around about the mid-1880s, 1890s, you get this flowering in Glasgow of this incredible
group of artists most of whom were women and they were producing art which was on a level
with anything that was being produced in Europe at the same time. They worked in disparate groups
but retrospectively they've been known by this blanket term the Glasgow Girls.
Glasgow was a city crying out for artists and designers to feed into the industries which it had
become famous for like shipbuilding and textiles. So in 1845, The Glasgow School of Art was founded
as a government school of design. The school experienced a golden age under the directorship
of Francis Newbery. Newbery legitimised craft and design like textiles, ceramics,
jewellery, metalwork and interior design. What was known as the applied arts. It was deemed to be
sort of womanly and not very serious but under him and his wife, Jessie Newbery, they, they treated it
much more as a kind of equivalent to painting and drawing if you like. Many of the so-called Glasgow
Girls would train under Francis Newbery, including Jessie M. King, Helen Paxton Brown, Annie French, Ann Macbeth and
Frances and Margaret Macdonald and Katharine Cameron. This type of training was essential for
refining their skills but also it defined their career paths. For example, Jessie M. King was
encouraged by Newbery to pursue her distinctive style. She elongated her figures and flattened
the forms into a decorative composition, rendered in bold outlines. This all-embracing approach to
art and design also defined the work of 'The Four', Margaret and Frances Macdonald and their husbands
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair and as can be seen at Hill House their aesthetic
was reflected in every facet of the building and design. The sisters were both highly skilled
watercolourists Margaret also experimented with gesso, whilst Frances was a talented metal worker
and embroiderer. Fostering a strong community of like-minded artists, critics and writers was
essential for female artists to achieve personal and professional independence in an art world
dominated by men. It was an interesting period in Britain generally actually, opportunities for
women artists were pretty good but for example in London if you trained at the Slade school
in London, women and men were taught in the same classes and they were allowed to study from life,
in Glasgow that was not the case, you had to, if you're a woman, you had to study from plaster
caste, from a draped model and so some of the artists like Bessie MacNicol, Katharine Cameron,
Stansmore Dean, they went to France. The Académie Colarossi, allowed men and women to attend the same
classes, so they were much more enlightened. The majority of the artists did live in Glasgow
and they benefitted from the establishment of the Glasgow Ladies Arts Club in 1882. It gave
them an opportunity to meet, to get together to exchange ideas about art and to exhibit
in a albeit quite sort of modest space. So later in her career Jessie M King moved to Kirkcudbright
with her husband E. A. Taylor and they, they bought this house Greengate. It developed into
quite a thriving artist colony, other artists came and visited Kirkcudbright and worked there
and a lot of artists came to stay, a lot of women artists and they really encouraged
them and you know furthered them in their, in their careers. Despite the diversity of their
practice and their diverging career paths, the women often found ways to support one another
through close collaboration and networking and looking back the factor that really unites them
all is the pursuit of innovation, not only in their art but in society as a whole. And women
were really pushing back against the system at that time and you get the emergence of the women's
suffrage movement in Scotland. Predominantly in Edinburgh funnily enough to start with,
which was much less progressive as a city, but then it of course spread to the rest of Scotland.
A number of the Glasgow Girls were associated, they supported the Suffrage movement by making
banners and so definitely the Glasgow Girls were associated with that that kind of activity.
When the achievements of the female artists who become known as the Glasgow Girls
are measured against the massive changes in society, they become all the more impressive.
Their efforts helped to pave the way for more women to pursue a career in art than ever before.
Thanks to the the pioneering work of people like Jude Burkhauser we now recognise that these
Glasgow artists had a huge impact right across that whole period from about 1885 to to the First
World War. Historically one tends to remember the male artists, so Charles Rennie Mackintosh
had rather dominated the scene but because of the research that was done in the 1990s and
later, these women have been kind of revived and we realized that they really did have a
huge and important impact and it's really important that we give them their place.
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