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Hand, Heart and Soul
30/08/07 11:57
Extract from chapter three: Sister studios
Glasgow School of Art was unique in Scotland in the number and type of courses that it offered women. No other city ran such a variety with a high percentage of applied art subjects, thanks to expansion of the workshops in both physical and educational terms by Fra Newbery and his supportive School Board. By the time Jessie King exchanged studying for teaching at the School, first in design and bookbinding, then embroidery, the number of women students and teachers had grown steadily. Of twenty-seven employed to teach between 1892 and 1920, twenty were in applied art and seven in drawing and painting. Student numbers were correspondingly up, with female students now accounting for forty-seven per cent of total numbers by session 1901–2. King herself would have taken a general first-year course in modelling, drawing and painting, before specialising in design and decorative art.
Above: 'The Immortals': Glasgow School of Art students at "Roaring Camp" in Ayreshire, about 1894. Left to right: Frances Macdonald, Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Katherine Cameron, Jessie Keppie and Margaret Macdonald.
Never the aloof administrator, Fra Newbery himself taught classes at different student levels including life drawing and figure design, determined that the School would only produce artists – who were, almost incidentally, designers or painters, craftsmen or architects. He personally led evening classes for men and daytime classes for women, and many photographs survive of him with a class. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert McNair and the Macdonald sisters all attended classes, the Macdonalds between 1892 and 1894. The growth of day classes was due to demand from middle-class women. By 1895 Newbery was able to boast the professionalism of such classes in contrast to the Aesthetic values pursued by the dedicated amateur: ‘the dilettante young lady who would decorate tambourines and milking stools with impossible forget-me-nots and sunflowers . . . has been entirely weeded out. She got no encouragement, and is now, as far as the School is concerned, non-existent.’
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