by Clare Hunter
In 1988, NeedleWorks, the company I ran in Glasgow, was invited to realise Margaret Macdonald’s textile designs for a House for an Art Lover. A consulting engineer, Graham Roxburgh, had decided on a venture to turn the Mackintosh drawings into bricks and mortar as a piece of creative research that would animate the vision behind it. As part of her research, Amanda Thompson, one of our team, visited the Glasgow School of Art’s archives, where its curator let her study the only extant embroidered panels created by Margaret, thought to be replicas of the curtains she created for the VIIIth Vienna Secession. While different, aspects of the design were similar and the techniques she used would undoubtedly have been replicated on those of the House for an Art Lover had they ever been created.
The two panels, mirror images of one another, were over five feet long and just sixteen inches wide. Each contained the abstracted figure of a woman. There was no detailing of her arms, legs or breasts; instead her body was indicated in a simple oval of deep pink, heavy silk. Each head, with its moon-white face, was inclined towards the other. The eyes were closed, the lips sensual and the heads haloed in a circle of silk, a shape repeated around her upper half by two leafed and curving stems which encased it, and by a single beaded circle around her lower limbs. Her hair, realised in bronze fabric, flowed down from the top of her head to merge with her outer body and frame it in a gleam of silk. To it was pinned a solitary cream circle, from which fell a heavy vertical band made of different braids that led to other small circles enclosing a vaginal design. Similar circles were laid within her body. The panels’ outermost borders were inlaid with deep, thick, pillar-like strips of braid that had, at their top, inward-facing pennants, each displaying two eyes, set one below the other. Margaret used a plethora of materials to achieve textural impact: linen, silk, metal threads, braid, ribbon, glass beads, white kid stretched over card for her faces. What they suggested were different weights of emotion: the steadfastness of the sentinel eye – watching braid pillars; the protectiveness of the inner circles; the self-containment of the women themselves, with their inner sensuality of silk enclosed in the strength of robust braid. Desire was hemmed in glass beads, hinted at with vaginal references: dark with light, line with curve, silk with thick braid, all creating a physical and emotive art that spoke of a woman’s inner experience as an independent and self-protected spirit. It was art of a kind never achieved before in needlework.
With these as her guide, Amanda set to work to source vintage braid and beads and dye silk to match those in the original design. It was patient work. Precise tones were vital: the pink not too pink, nor too sharp, having depth but carrying light; the gold not too lustrous, muted but not overly subtle. Once the materials were reproduced, the team set to work on specially constructed frames to hand stitch Margaret’s never-materialised masterpieces. We couched down the thick lines of black braid, appliquéd the cream and pink circles that lay staggered along linear lines, trying to find her own hand by using a style of stitching that emulated Margaret’s own: not so fine that they hardly registered, yet avoiding a coarseness that might seem crude. By the time the panels were completed, the project had run out of money and it was shelved. It was resuscitated, however, in 1994, by which time Amanda had died tragically young of cancer. Two of the panels had disappeared. I was tasked with replacing them and, having kept Amanda’s original dye recipes, I resuscitated the hues that Margaret might have had in mind. It was all for naught in the end, as the panels, large though they were, did not cover their allotted spaces. In 1988 their measurements had had to be estimated as the building wasn’t yet constructed. Our embroidered panels were abandoned and the artist Claire Heminsley was commissioned to stitch just one exemplar piece of the correct dimensions to hang alongside its now-stencilled fellows. But I was glad of the small part I played in their genesis. It allowed me to replay Margaret’s techniques, her instinctive placing of circles along a line of containment; the intuitive rise and fall of flat and raised texture to let the eye rest and lift again; of the way she sewed a bottom stem, separated it as it rose to leaf and tripled it across a woman’s face to become a grounded symbol of growth and renewal. If I had never had the opportunity to stitch what she might have sewn, I would never have got as close to her process of making art.
In 1902 Margaret won the Diploma of Honour at the International Decorative Arts Exhibition in Turin for her gesso panel The White Rose and the Red Rose. The following year she and Charles were commissioned to create the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, and chose to reference its street name, which in Scottish Gaelic translates as ‘the alley of the willows’. In their collaborative work there was always a story, albeit distilled into abstracted imagery and atmosphere. The tea room’s proprietor, Kate Cranston – not just a commercial but also a cultural entrepreneur – had already worked with Charles on her other tearoom establishments. A champion of the temperance movement and women’s suffrage, her tea rooms were ultra-modern both in style and social opportunity. Here were places where women could go unescorted to meet other women and share the same social space as men.
The Mackintoshes were to be given free rein on a four-storey building. They designed not only the exterior façade and interior backdrop, but also the furniture, cutlery, vases and staff uniforms – even, it is said, the way a waitress’s apron bow was tied.
They had also begun to design Hill House, a commission to create a new home for the publisher Walter Blackie. Like the Willow Tea Rooms, Margaret and Charles were responsible for both its exterior and interior design. They had responsibility for every detail of its domestic environment. In the bedroom, they installed appliquéd panels of dreaming women, the upholstery was embroidered with roses, the lampshades fashioned in cream silk, braided in black and adorned with Glasgow Roses and black veined leaves. For the drawing room, Margaret made an antimacassar (a rectangle of fabric laid over the back of a chair to protect it). It is an audacious piece of needlework for its time: abstract art in stitching. On a black background flecked with white, she criss-crossed green velvet and lilac ribbon with cream braid, lines of different thicknesses woven in and out of each other in an intuitive reach for balance. At its centre is a small rectangle of striped fabric with an inverted ‘V’ of ribbon travelling though it to reach, at its base a small roundel filled with tiny pearl beads. It is arresting and complex, fashioned in unusual colour combinations and intentional contrasts: weight, texture, open and closed space. It is, for me, her signature piece. When Hill House was completed, it was hailed as a domestic masterpiece, an inspired fusion of traditional Scottish architecture and contemporary artistic ideals.
Margaret continued to work on the Seven Princesses commission for Fritz Waerndorfer’s music salon, and she and Charles both continued to exhibit internationally and receive commissions and favourable reviews. In 1908, Margaret’s sister Frances returned to Glasgow following the breakdown of her marriage to Herbert MacNair. She found part-time work at the Glasgow School of Art, teaching embroidery and enamelling design. Her watercolours trace an ever-deepening depression. In 1921 she died, most likely by suicide. MacNair destroyed all her letters and artwork in his possession. The same year, Margaret and Charles sold their house in Glasgow for a mere £400. It had been a celebrated showcase of their innovative style (eventually saved for posterity by the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow). Their glory days were fading. Charles had tried to set up an architectural practice in the city but, with limited funds, it proved impossible. In 1914 the couple moved to Suffolk, where they painted a series of exquisite botanical studies, jointly signed, and then to London, where again Charles tried to establish his own practice. A photograph of one of Margaret’s watercolours, The Sleeper, bears witness to their wanderings, with addresses written on the back in pencil, each crossed out as they moved: 120 Main Street; 78 Ann Street; 43a Glebe Place, Chelsea. In London, they existed on small commissions: a textile design for a handkerchief, another one for fabric, graphics for a menu. But this celebrated arch
itect of Glasgow’s new School of Art, whose work was acclaimed on the European stage, was little known in London and his efforts to set up a practice failed. There was a brief glimmer of possibility when in 1916 they were invited to undertake their first English commission, a house in Northampton at 78 Derngate. Despite its bold interiors of black woodwork, walls and ceilings and striking furnishings of shot purple edged in emerald-green ribbon and black-and-white striped wallpaper edged in bright blue braid, it made little stir in a nation now beleaguered by the First World War.
Margaret’s last recorded works were two watercolours. La Parfumée Mort was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy of Painters in Watercolours in 1921. Against a dark, almost black, background, a woman’s corpse is heaped high in roses. A sweep of five spectral female figures stretch skeletal arms out protectively across her body. It seemed an omen of her sister’s death. The Legend of the Blackthorns, painted in 1922, just after her sister died, is even darker, showing two bowed women draped in black cloaks and suffused in the delicate white blossom of the blackthorn, the flower of grief. The Mackintoshes left London and moved to France, where they could live more cheaply. They exiled themselves from Glasgow and from Britain, and concentrated on being together.
In France, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, eventually settling at the Hotel du Commerce in Port Vendres in the south of France, where Charles continued to paint. There is no trace of Margaret. For the next four years, she disappeared from public view. There is only a glimpse of her in the small bundle of twenty-three letters Charles sent to her in 1927 when she had to return to London for six weeks of medical treatment. His letters are written on wafer-thin paper, the earliest ones in pencil. He tells her how he has discovered that by not leaning too heavily on the lead he can keep the cost of postage down. His letters speak of his need of her, of shared delights of black cherries and ripe figs. He sends tales of the family and staff at the Hotel du Commerce and their fondness for her. He goes down to the harbour by himself in the early morning and finds that the quiet singing of its waters reminds him of the soft whirring of her sewing machine. So Margaret was still sewing. Whatever she was creating, however, has long since disappeared. He writes of his love of her, his debt to her creativity which was, he insists, three-quarters of his own achievement. He did not know then that the growth on his nose, which he describes to her, was the beginning of a cancerous tumour that would kill him some months later. On Margaret’s return, Charles became terminally ill and they moved back to London, where he died in 1928. There were brief mentions of his death in The Times and The Glasgow Herald. The letters he wrote to Margaret in 1927 were kept by her, tied up in a faded blue ribbon.
Margaret died five years later, on 7 January 1933, of a cardiac arrest. The Hunterian Art Gallery and Museum Archive is guardian not only to some of her paintings, but also to her remaining few possessions. I went to see them, laid out by their curator on isolated tables. There were the contents of her work-basket: a few yards of metallic thread wrapped around a twist of paper; two bundles of cream and white braid; small scraps of velvet in apricot, purple, pale pink, cream, rose; a fold of cerise-pink silk; an offcut of brown and cream organza and another of black voile flecked with cream; and a length of violet ribbon edged in black. That was all, less than a metre of fabric all told and assorted thread and braid. The colours echoed the palette she had used for much of her needlework, the pinks, purples, cream and black. On another table lay her bank book. Her outgoings were circumspect: ten pounds taken out here and there, a doctor paid, the radium laboratory’s bill settled, payments for what turned out to be ineffectual remedies to Boots the Chemists, the Herb Farm Shop and Hampstead Health Food Stores. She moved from place to place, from the Belgrave Club to London’s Ladies Dwellings to Falmouth Hotel. Payments to Thomas Cook’s travel agency are evidence of her journeying further afield.
When she died, her cousin Joseph Tilly Hardeman wrote to her executor, her brother Archibald Macdonald, to say that he had registered her death and at her flat he had gone through the letters he found in a suitcase and destroyed those that were ‘of no use’, keeping a few he thought might be of interest. He had also locked away three rings and the only money he found: £1.2s 9d. When he went through her handbag he discovered a rough draft of her will, which he attached. In it she asked to be cremated ‘in the simplest and cheapest manner’ and that her ashes be ‘cast to the winds’. The contents of her studio were to be sold or dispersed by William Davidson, a loyal friend of both her and Charles, who was to keep or give them away to those who would ‘care for the reputation of the Artists who made them’. There were a few itemised bequests: to her cousin, her silver cake dish; to her nephew’s wife, her jewellery; to Desmond Chapman-Huston, the Irish writer, her silver grapefruit spoons with M. M. M. on their handles and Charles’s silver salad fork and spoon. The last item I viewed was her inventory, dated 13 February 1933. It listed her furniture, jewellery, plate, glass, pottery, clothes and the other effects Margaret left behind. Among them was an ‘old sewing machine’. The valuator estimated their total value at £88 16s 2d.
Her obituary in The Times referred to her as Mrs Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Glasgow, the city that had spawned their talent, later reclaimed Charles but not Margaret. After her death, a retrospective of Charles’s work was quickly organised. The influential London critic P. Morton Shane dismissed Margaret’s work as being of ‘decidedly inferior artistic calibre’ and accused her of leading Mackintosh into ‘a usurious ornamental vulgarity’. She was not just marginalised, but eradicated. The male world of art had claimed Mackintosh as their own, untainted by the artistic influence of a woman. Over the next few decades, as Charles Rennie Mackintosh became lionised, Margaret Macdonald’s art and Margaret herself faded in his shadow. The artist who made visible the psychological world of women, interpreted inner thoughts and feelings through the textured mediums of needlework and gesso, and used the symbolism in her watercolours to transmit the atmosphere and mood of women’s experiences; who was thought to be, in her time, one of the most talented artists of her generation and who so defiantly transgressed the conventions of embroidery, became a footnote in the history of art.
The Willow Tea Rooms on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street are now being restored. The renovations are screened by large hoardings that feature full-size portraits of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Kate Cranston. There are none of Margaret. Inside there is an information desk serviced by women eager to market the revival of a commercial attraction for the city. I ask about Margaret Macdonald; why is she not pictured outside? The woman I speak to is confused. She has never heard of her. ‘This was her work too,’ I say, ‘as much her work as that of Rennie Mackintosh.’ I am aware that my outrage is verging on the confrontational, and that the woman is only hearing my tone, not my information. I modify my tone. ‘Look her up on Google’, I suggest, and walk away. ‘I’ll do that,’ the woman’s conciliatory voice follows me as I walk disconsolately down Sauchiehall Street. How long does it have to take, I wonder to myself, for women artists to be properly and fairly acknowledged?
In 2002 Margaret Macdonald’s gesso panel The White Rose and the Red Rose sold at Christie’s Auction House in New York for £1.7 million. The ascendency of the Glasgow Girls was short lived. The First World War and its sad depletion of a generation of young men saw creative momentum and artistic opportunity recede. Books, magazines, transfer companies and pattern makers dominated the world of sewing once more. The term ‘art needlework’ disappeared from the sewing lexicon and, in time, from the curriculum of the Glasgow School of Art. By the end of the First World War, Ann Macbeth was pragmatic:
But the pendulum must swing back again soon and the women of canteens and munitions works, of the farm-yard and motor-van will turn again, though with a difference, to the more leisured work of gentler days as a relief from war and its huge transformation of all our former habits and fashions. We shall be changed, women and men, will stand partners together in works
of all kinds . . .
But women artists created a climate of exploration at Glasgow School of Arts, and a tradition of innovative needlework. While they didn’t succeed in completely eradicating the gender-based discrimination needlework faced, they were active agents in demonstrating how sewing could be central to an artistic movement. Margaret’s story mirrored that of other women artists of the time, women who used needlework to create a different kind of art – Pheobe Traquair, Mary Lowndes, Margaret Gilmore, Muriel Boyd – and who are now all but forgotten. But the Glasgow School of Art continued their spirit, with others, such as Kathleen Mann, Kath Whyte, Hannah Frew Paterson and Malcolm Lochhead, following in the footsteps of the pioneering embroiderers who made their reputation through imaginative use of fabric and thread. Through their art and their teaching, they continued to inspire men as well as women to experiment with needlework design and make of it an art.
In the revamped Glasgow Style Gallery at Kelvingrove Museum, the works of the city’s early twentieth-century artists, designers and architects are on display. Glasgow owes the major share of its international reputation and visitor appeal to their artistic flair. It was these artists who fed the cultural ambitions of Glasgow, rescuing it from being cast as a gloomy industrial sprawl mired by colonial trade and elevating it to a city that offered style and sensuality. Their experiments with simplicity and the inherent quality of materials – the glow of burnished copper, the gleam of silver, the bloom of glass, the rise of a stitch – celebrate a fusion of art and craft, of function and beauty. The artistry and intellect of these artists brought accolades to Glasgow. Now in their gallery I was surrounded by their elegant furniture, bold ceramics, textured wall panels, exquisite jewellery, streamlined cutlery and book bindings. I am, of course, trying to find embroideries, especially those of Jessie Newbery, Margaret Macdonald, Ann Macbeth and others who played such a major part in their triumph. But I cannot find a single stitch. There are gesso panels by the Macdonald sisters, illustrations by Jessie Newbery, the ground-breaking book on educational needlework penned by Anne Macbeth and Margaret Swanson but there is no sewing. It is as if all the ambition of the Glasgow embroiderers to elevate needlework and promote its capacity as an art form had come to naught. But they left a legacy, the legacy of textile art, a term coined later, which others would embrace, experiment with and explore, investigating the limitless possibilities of needlework’s materials and techniques to express their professional art.