Herbert MacNair
James Herbert McNair ( born December 23, 1868 in Glasgow, Scotland, † April 22, 1955 in Innellan, Argyll, Scotland) was a Scottish painter and artisans of the Art Nouveau style. James Herbert McNair, his wife Frances MacDonald McNair, whose sister Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh and their brother, the famous artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, belonged to the Glasgow School and together formed the art group The Four.
Life and work
James Herbert McNair, who was born and raised in Glasgow, began his artistic career in 1887 with studies in Rouen in France. In 1888 he took part in Glasgow to a architecture internship of John Honeyman. From 1888 to 1889 attended the evening classes at the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College. From 1888, he trained in the architectural practice of Honeyman & Keppie, where he met Charles Rennie Mackintosh. From 1889 he also attended evening classes at Glasgow School of Art, where he led the MacDonald sisters Frances and Margaret met with Mackintosh, whose understanding of art corresponded in content, technique and form their opinion.
Soon the four were a creative alliance and presented in 1894 for the first time their new avant-garde art against which attracted great attention and introduced her as The Four. Together they coined in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the Glasgow Style and exerted great influence on the later development of Art Nouveau from. 1895 McNair left the Glasgow School of Art, the training ended with Honeyman & Keppie and founded an independent studio in Glasgow, but where he was not creatively active as an architect, but as a painter, graphic artist and artisans. In 1898, he celebrated with an exhibition of his watercolors in London with great success.
On June 14, 1899 James Herbert McNair married his longtime girlfriend Frances MacDonald. Together they went to Liverpool, where McNair taught at the School of Architecture and Applied Art. The couple designed the interiors of their apartment in Oxford Street 54 and hired a Lady's Writing Room at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin. Frances also started to teach and developed remarkable skills in jewelry and textile crafts. On June 18, 1900, her son Sylvan was born.
The closure of the School of Architecture in 1905 led to a gradual decline in the artistic career of the couple. Then there were financial failures due to bad investments, because together with a colleague tried McNair the founding of the school, but soon they had to close it again. 1908 the couple moved finally back to Glasgow. Their exhibitions were very successful, however, so that after 1912 no further undertook. From McNair no longer artistic works are from 1911 until his death in 1955, survived.
1913, the couple traveled to Canada, but returned in 1914 before the outbreak of the First World War back to Scotland. After the death of his wife in 1921 McNair destroyed a large part of their work. In the early 1920s, McNair operation along with his son Sylvan an auto repair shop in Linlithgow. End of the 20s Sylvan emigrated to Rhodesia. McNair moved to Argyll, where he died in Innellan 1955. Most of his paintings are now in the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow and at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.