Doves And Dreams
Until November 18; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

At the heart of Glasgow’s first Mackintosh Festival, the Hunterian Art Gallery has something a little bit different. While we are all well-acquainted with the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and fairly familiar with those of his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, few can claim to know much about the other half of the Glasgow Four.

Now, for the first time, an exhibition is devoted to the other two: Frances Macdonald and J Herbert McNair. And while the curator is utterly objective in her approach, the art itself speaks loud and clear, telling the tragic tale of two young artists for whom early success was followed by misery and heart break.

Frances Macdonald was the younger sister of Margaret Macdonald. Though born in Staffordshire, they moved to Glasgow when Frances was still in her teens, and enrolled as day students at Glasgow School of Art. Highly talented, the sisters won numerous awards for their art, both individually and in collaboration.

At the same time, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his friend J Herbert McNair were attending evening classes in architecture. Noticing stylistic affinities between the four, the school’s director, Francis Newbery, introduced them to each other, and immediately they hit it off. You can see a substantial leap in Mackintosh’s graphic style between 1892 and 1893, when he was exposed to the sinuous designs of the Macdonald sisters.

The four young artists soon became a recognised group, dubbed the “Spook School” by the press, in reference to the emaciated, witch-like figures which insinuated themselves throughout their designs. They collaborated amongst themselves, and as Herbert McNair put it, “When two are working together in consort, it is hard to say how much is the suggestion or influence of the one and how much that of the other.”

To a certain extent that was wishful thinking. McNair’s architectural talents were no match for Mackintosh’s, and McNair’s graphic skills were far outweighed by those of the Macdonald sisters. While the women’s drawings and designs are fluent and elegant, his are clumsy and confused; it is easy to tell the difference.

It’s McNair’s furniture which really stands out, and in particular his smoker’s cabinet, with its big, bold, curving forms. Subtle detail was not his forte, but here the waves and swirls of the Glasgow Style are magnified in chunky wood and brass, creating an audacious piece of furniture.

Meanwhile the sisters were producing paintings, book illustrations, metalwork and more, unleashing their imaginations on chivalric tales and scenes of mysterious symbolism. Their 21 illustrations for The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, only discovered recently, shimmer with grace and romance.

In 1899 things changed. Frances Macdonald married Herbert McNair, and they set up home together in Liverpool, where he had been invited to teach stained glass and decorative design. Frances would no longer collaborate with Margaret, but instead with McNair, while her sister would team up with Mackintosh.

The McNairs enjoyed a few years of international success, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, the Vienna Secession and in a major international show in Turin. Their home in Liverpool, with its avant-garde interiors, was “a centre of much merriment and entertainment” among the artists and architects of Liverpool. Augustus John quipped that their door knocker was “most popular with the children of the neighbourhood who by its means keep themselves in contact with the most advanced Art movement.”

But the uncomfortable truth is ever present in the Hunterian exhibition: Herbert McNair was holding Frances Macdonald back. His works are clearly the weaker of the two; one need only look at their two beaten copper panels of a mother and child side by side. His mother is unsteady and ungainly compared with the decorative flourishes of Macdonald’s female figure. The same combination, of her virtuoso designs with his clumsy effort to keep up, is repeated many times.

In 1905 McNair lost his job, and soon after, his wealthy family went bankrupt, leaving the McNairs without financial support. They moved back to Glasgow where Frances taught at the art school, but McNair could not find work. He turned to drink, and left her to look after their young son on her own. In 1914 her mother died, and her sister left Glasgow.

One final series of watercolours by Frances places the fey damsels of her early work in dark, disturbing scenes of dilemma and despair. They suggest entrapment, and a loss of innocence and freedom. In them, she seems to turn over the old choices she made, leaving her sister, trusting her future to McNair, and becoming a mother.

In 1921, Frances Macdonald McNair died at the age of 48; many believe she committed suicide. McNair, it’s said, destroyed her work in his distress. He never made art again. One last picture in the exhibition brings the tragedy to a close: it is by Margaret, mourning for the sister she lost.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.09.06