HAND, HEART AND SOUL
The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland
by Elizabeth Cumming
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.’
The range of subjects taught by women was impressive. Joining Miss C.M. Dunlop, the first female needlework teacher, Jessie Newbery taught ‘original design for artistic needlework’ from 1893 and took charge of a new department wholly devoted to embroidery the following year. Dunlop’s work was wonderfully rich and diverse, inspired in its variety of sources and attitude to pattern and threadwork. In the 1900–14 period Annie French (1872–1965), known now principally as an illustrator, taught ceramic decoration, Helen Muir Wood (1864–1930) enamels and block cutting, Agnes Bankier Harvey (1874–1947) metalwork, enamelling and goldsmithing, Norah Neilson Gray (1882–1931) fashion plate drawing and De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar general applied arts and later enamelling, a field in which she excelled. Dorothy Carleton Smyth (1880–1933), who had also worked for Chivers, and her sister Olive (1882–1949) led classes in sgraffito and gesso plaster working. Dorothy Carleton Smyth would be appointed the first woman director of the Glasgow School of Art but died before she could take up the position. There were, of course, a good number of men teaching the decorative arts. In addition, between the mid 1890s and 1914 Newbery invited key designers from outside to teach or lecture to broaden the student experience: leading enameller Alexander Fisher, whose London workshop classes were attended by members of Britain’s upper classes, as well as Arthur Gaskin and Harold Stabler. Voysey declined a parttime position in 1909 but did visit. Working in the material was always vital to each area, and students tried their hand at many different disciplines before majoring in one particular craft. It was a system which in its generalism was sensible and Scottish to its very core.
Picture top: Waist buckle designed by Jessie M. King for Liberty, 1906. Silver, set with enamel, 4 x 8.8 cm.
Now available in paperback priced £16.99
View cart
