The Glasgow Girls were the women artists and designers who, between roughly 1880 and 1920, made Glasgow one of the most exciting places in Europe for a woman to make art. Painters, embroiderers, illustrators, metalworkers and designers, they were central to the creation of the Glasgow Style, that distinctive Scottish flowering of Art Nouveau — yet, unlike the Glasgow Boys and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, they were long written out of the story, and had to wait until 1990 for the exhibition that finally gave them their due.
This page tells their story: the opportunities that made them possible, the school that nurtured them, the famous Macdonald sisters, the revolution in embroidery, the painters and illustrators among them, their part in the Glasgow Style, and their rediscovery at last.
Women artists in a man’s world
In the late nineteenth century, when women were still barred from much of the artistic establishment, Glasgow became something remarkable: a place where women could pursue serious careers in art and design and be taken seriously for it. Between about 1885 and 1920 an extraordinary number of talented women trained, worked and taught in the city, in painting and in the applied arts alike. They were never a single movement — their styles and media were as varied as their personalities, and not all even lived in Glasgow — but they were bound together by shared experience, by friendship and mutual support, and by a common determination to assert themselves as women artists in a world that gave them little encouragement.
The school under the Newberys
At the centre of it all stood the Glasgow School of Art, and its progressive director, Francis — ‘Fra’ — Newbery. Newbery threw open the school to women as students and, crucially, as teachers, and fostered an atmosphere in which the applied arts — embroidery, metalwork, illustration, design — were valued as highly as painting. Many of the women who studied under him formed lifelong friendships and returned to teach in the departments that had shaped them. They were supported, too, by the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists, founded in 1882, which gave women a forum of their own in which to meet and exhibit. It was this hothouse — the school and the city around it — that produced the Glasgow Girls.
The Macdonald sisters & ‘The Four’
The most celebrated of the Girls were the sisters Margaret Macdonald — later Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh — and Frances Macdonald, artists of striking originality whose dreamlike, symbolist work — worked in gesso, metal and watercolour, peopled by elongated, ethereal figures — helped define the new Glasgow Style. With their future husbands, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair, they formed the group known as ‘The Four’, whose exhibited designs caused a stir at home and abroad and carried the Glasgow Style to the Continent. Margaret in particular became Mackintosh’s closest collaborator; he is famously said to have declared that she had genius where he had only talent. Her great gesso panels, among them the one made for the Willow Tea Rooms, are among the treasures of the movement.
The embroidery revolution
If the Macdonalds gave the Glasgow Style its otherworldly imagery, another of the Girls transformed an entire art form. Jessie Newbery — the director’s wife — founded the department of embroidery at the Glasgow School of Art and, through it, raised needlework from a domestic craft to a recognised art of design, teaching a fresh, simple style built on appliqué and bold lettering. She was joined in the department by Ann Macbeth, who carried the revolution further, and together they trained a generation. It was in their work, and that of their circle, that the celebrated stylised ‘Glasgow rose’ became a signature of the whole movement — a motif that would spread from embroidery across every branch of Glasgow design.
Painters & illustrators
The Girls excelled in every medium. Among the painters, Bessie MacNicol was perhaps the most gifted, creating luminous portraits and open-air scenes before her early death; Norah Neilson Gray became a distinguished portraitist and, during the First World War, a war artist whose moving paintings of nurses and wounded soldiers are among the finest such works of the conflict. In illustration and design, Jessie M. King won international fame for her delicate, fairy-tale line and her illustrated books, and was hailed as a pioneer of batik in Britain; her friend Annie French produced intricate, jewel-like drawings in a related vein. Others worked in yet further fields — among them the metalworker De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar, the painter and etcher Katharine Cameron, and Helen Paxton Brown. Between them, these women showed that the Glasgow flowering reached far beyond a single style or craft.
Half the Glasgow Style
Taken together, the Glasgow Girls were not a footnote to the Glasgow Style but half of its substance. They applied the new decorative language — its roses and its long, sinuous lines, its debts to Celtic ornament, Japanese art and the Pre-Raphaelites — to an astonishing range of things: book illustrations and posters, wallpapers and fabrics, embroidered panels and dress, jewellery, metalwork and painted pottery. In doing so they embodied the central idea of the movement, that beauty belonged in everyday objects and that the applied arts deserved to stand on equal terms with painting. The visual culture of Glasgow around 1900, it has rightly been said, was to a remarkable degree produced by and for women.
Rediscovered at last
And then they were forgotten. While the Glasgow Boys and Mackintosh were celebrated with major retrospectives, the women who had done so much were quietly edited out of the histories, their contribution overlooked for the better part of a century. Their rescue came in 1990, when the researcher Jude Burkhauser mounted a landmark exhibition, Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880–1920, at Kelvingrove — fittingly, in the year Glasgow was European City of Culture. The show, and the name it gave them, at last brought these artists the recognition they had always deserved, and revealed just how central women had been to Glasgow’s golden age of art and design. Today their work is studied, exhibited and treasured — the forgotten heroines of the Glasgow Style restored to their rightful place.
Leading figures
| Artist | Known for |
|---|---|
| Margaret Macdonald | Gesso panels; ‘The Four’ with Mackintosh |
| Frances Macdonald | Symbolist works; ‘The Four’ with MacNair |
| Jessie Newbery | The Art School’s embroidery revolution |
| Ann Macbeth | Embroidery and design |
| Jessie M. King | Fairy-tale illustration; batik |
| Bessie MacNicol | Luminous portraits and open-air scenes |
| Norah Neilson Gray | Portraits; First World War art |
Frequently asked questions
Who were the Glasgow Girls?
They were a group of women artists and designers active in Glasgow between about 1880 and 1920, working in painting, embroidery, illustration, metalwork and design. Never a formal movement, they were central to the Glasgow Style and to the flourishing of women’s art in the city.
Where does the name ‘Glasgow Girls’ come from?
It was coined as a deliberate echo of the Glasgow Boys, the male painters of the same era; the artists never used it themselves. The name became widely known through Jude Burkhauser’s 1990 exhibition at Kelvingrove, which finally brought the group recognition.
Who were the leading Glasgow Girls?
They included the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald, the embroiderers Jessie Newbery and Ann Macbeth, the illustrator Jessie M. King, the painters Bessie MacNicol and Norah Neilson Gray, and Annie French, among many others. Their styles and media were highly varied.
What was ‘The Four’?
‘The Four’ were Margaret and Frances Macdonald and their husbands, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair. Their distinctive, symbolist designs were central to the creation of the Glasgow Style and helped carry it to international attention.
What did the Glasgow Girls make?
They worked across an unusually wide range of arts: paintings and gesso panels, embroidery and textiles, book illustration and posters, jewellery, metalwork and painted pottery. This embrace of the applied arts, on equal terms with painting, was a defining feature of the Glasgow Style.
Why were the Glasgow Girls forgotten?
Although women were central to Glasgow’s art around 1900, they were largely written out of later histories, which celebrated the Glasgow Boys and Mackintosh instead. Their achievement was only properly recognised with Jude Burkhauser’s survey exhibition in 1990.
Where can you see the Glasgow Girls’ work?
Their work can be seen at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and the Glasgow School of Art, at the restored Willow Tea Rooms — home to a Margaret Macdonald panel — and at the Hunterian, among other collections in Glasgow and beyond.