Glasgow School
The Glasgow School was an important group of modern artists and designers from Glasgow in Scotland. The group of artists emerged in the 1870s at the Glasgow School of Art, reached significant importance and greatest impact from 1890 to about 1910. Important subgroups were The Four, also known as the Spook School, the Glasgow Girls and the Glasgow Boys. Glasgow experienced in this time an economic boom, with the same time a significant Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movement began, especially in the areas of architecture, interior design and painting.
The Four
Among the most prominent founders of the Glasgow School were among four artists: the famous architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his wife, the painter and glass artist Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, whose sister Frances MacDonald McNair and her husband, James Herbert McNair. Together they coined in the Arts and Crafts Movement geometric Glasgow Style, a syncretic blend of Celtic and Japanese art, which provided the art scene on the continent for attention. The MacDonald sisters, born in England and grew up, came with her parents in 1890 to Glasgow, where she studied in the following years at the Glasgow School of Art. The two men, however, had grown up in Glasgow and attended at the time the evening classes at this art school. Independently of each other, the two couples tried in similar styles of painting and decorating.
As the director of the art school noticed the strong affinity in content, technique and form of the two pairs, he introduced them to each other. Soon the four were a creative alliance and presented their avant-garde new art prior to the art exhibition of the students where they reaped great acclaim. From that point on they were known as The Four and obtained great influence on the Art Nouveau style. 1900 Margaret MacDonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh participating in the exhibition of the Vienna Secession, which made them internationally known. Through her work, she exerted a lasting influence on the work of Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann.
The Glasgow Girls
The Glasgow Girls were a group of designers and artists, all of the Glasgow School of Art had visited and were now working as artists and their work throughout Europe and the United States made a major contribution to the development of art and design. Most important representatives among them were, of course, Frances MacDonald McNair and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, as well as Jessie Marion King influenced the development of the Glasgow Style. There were painters like Bessie MacNicol and Norah Neilson Gray, the more likely were close with her style the Late Impressionism. Other well-known artists were Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Katherine Cameron and Jessie Keppie.
The Glasgow Boys
In the 1880s and 1890s saw an artists' collective sensation, which quickly became known as the Glasgow Boys. As founder and mentor of the group applies William York MacGregor. These artists were strongly influenced by the realism of the French Barbizon school and made by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in Scotland known. Object of their genre painting were next to motifs from the Greater Glasgow mainly rural scenes from Kirkcudbright, Cockburnspath and other areas of Scotland. The paintings of the Glasgow Boys were issued by the Grosvenor Gallery in London and throughout Europe, earning wide acclaim, so that established the revolutionary realism of the Glasgow Boys in the Scottish art. Her works are on display at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery as well as in the Burrell Collection and the Broughton House in Kirkcudbright. Important representatives of this group were James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, Joseph Crawhall, Edward Arthur Walton, James Paterson, Edward Atkinson Hornel, John Lavery, Alexander, Alexander Roche, Thomas Millie Dow, Grosvenor Thomas and Thomas Morton Corsan.