Art Nouveau in Glasgow - Times Past

In partnership with the Glasgow Times, our archivists are exploring Glasgow's fascinating history. This week, Barbara McLean writes about Art Nouveau in Glasgow.

The Glasgow Style is influenced by European Art Nouveau, itself inspired by nature. This Style flourished between 1890 – 1910 and is represented in the city’s architecture, interior design and artwork. It’s also synonymous with its most famous practitioner: the artist and architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Look around Glasgow and you’ll see both original and re-imagined examples.  

Take the city’s Mackintosh buildings. When I was growing up, the two I knew the best were those I visited on school trips. The magnificent Scotland Street School is likely to be the first Mackintosh building that many Glasgow school pupils of the past visited. As the Museum of Education, it hosted school visits for pupils to experience life in a classroom of yesteryear: my primary class enjoyed ours in a Victorian schoolroom. The building’s flood of daylight and use of nature imagery make it markedly different to any other school building of the period. In our collections, we hold the original architectural plans Mackintosh prepared in 1904 for the School Board of Glasgow.  

Years later, I visited the Mackintosh House at the Hunterian Art Gallery, this time with my secondary school art class. I remember trooping up Hillhead Street and being impressed by the famous front door to nowhere which is located several feet above the ground. The Mackintosh House itself is a stunning recreation of the home of Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald. Together, they formed one half of the Glasgow Four, an alliance created during the group’s student days at the Glasgow School of Art. The house’s interior – from the dark ground-floor dining room to the white, light-filled, top-floor drawing room – reflects the growth of a flower from its roots in the earth to its petals in the sun. 

Another iconic Mackintosh building is Queen’s Cross Church in Firhill, his first ecclesiastical commission. Designed in the Gothic style, it incorporates various Art Nouveau elements including the awe-inspiring stone carved rose stained-glass window in its east elevation. The furnishings still survive and while it’s now no longer a church, it has been the headquarters of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society since 1977. We hold both the 1897 Mackintosh plans for the property as well as the records it generated as Queen’s Cross Free Church. 

An intriguing aspect of this Style in the city is that several examples don’t date from the original period. For example, House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park, although designed by Mackintosh, is just over thirty years old. It was executed between 1989 – 1990 from a set of drawings Mackintosh had prepared for a competition held almost ninety years before. It embodies many Glasgow Style features including the intricately carved roses and heart on the piano in the white, light-filled Music Room. 

It seems the 1980s was a popular decade in which to pay tribute to this bygone Style. In 1985, when the Princes Square complex was being developed, an Art Nouveau-inspired metal peacock was added to the building frontage. To this day, it looms large over the Princes Square entrance on Buchanan Street. 

Further up and round the corner into Sauchiehall Street is a beautiful example of original Glasgow Style stained glass. What is now Waterstone’s was once the La Scala picture house, one of Glasgow’s many cinemas. The building still retains the cinema’s lovely stained-glass window above the entrance which shows a shield emblazoned with a green oval. This sits atop a hanging bough of flowering greenery. And, of course, a little further up Sauchiehall Street is Mackintosh at the Willow, the last surviving tearooms designed by Mackintosh. 

Finally, it’s worthwhile recognising that some of the buildings exemplifying the Glasgow Style are now gone. A lovely example was Hayfield Public School in Hutchesontown, now demolished. The architect was John Hamilton who designed it for the School Board of Glasgow in 1903. He included stone lettering on the building’s front (spelling out the school’s name) carved in the distinctive Glasgow Style. The top of the building also boasted sinuously flowing lines, another feature of the Style.