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Abstract
Francis Newbery, Director of the Glasgow School of Art between 1885 and1918, produced a painting that depicted the deliberations of the School’s governors as they commissioned the building of new school premises designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The painting was acquired by the School in 1914 and hung in the Board Room. A mixture of deliberate technique and fortuitous circumstance in the creation of this work seems to have made for a canvas saturated with meaning in the evidently discordant complexity of its representations of time and space. An examination of the painting is used critically to engage with the story of the creation of Mackintosh’s masterwork, and to contextualize the process in which the latter was produced as a significant work of art.
Notes
1 GSAA GOV 2/4, September 18, 1895. Reference to a ‘plain building’ is made in an excerpt from Glasgow City Corporation minutes inserted here. The reference is a quotation from a letter of March 4, 1895 from GSA governors (Burnett, Salmon, et al.) to the Corporation.
2 D.P. Bliss, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 1961, p.1.
3 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, London: Penguin, 1949, pp.158–65.
4 Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement, London, Routledge, 1952, pp.66, 75.
5 See for example James Macaulay, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, W.W. Norton, London, 2010, p.279.
6 Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 77.
7 Macaulay, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 264.
8 Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 69.
9 The painting, then known as ‘The Portrait Group of the Members of the Building Committee of the School’, or just simply ‘The Portrait Group’, was unveiled by chairman of the Scotch Education Department, Sir John Struthers at 10am on the morning of May 18, 1914 before the assembled Governors of the school. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 that year. GSAA GOV 2/9 p.137.
10 The Boardroom and the painting were both unharmed in the fire that engulfed the west end of the Glasgow School of Art on May 23, 2014. Along with all other surviving works of art, the painting has been removed from the building and is currently in storage.
11 William Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery and the Building of the School’, in William Buchanan (ed.), Mackintosh’s Masterwork: The Glasgow School of Art, Edinburgh, 1994, 13–51 at p48.
12 Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), 1999, translation E.M. Kain and D. Britt, first published 1931, p.62.
13 Christopher Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, Fontana Press, 1987. Smout describes the ‘civic spirit’ of late nineteenth century Glasgow, pp.43–5.
14 See Murdo Macdonald, Scottish Art, Thames and Hudson, 2000.
15 Riegl, The Group, 75–8.
16 Inasmuch as these two ‘main actors’ are artists, Newbery’s painting might also be seen in relation to a contemporary tradition of group portraits of artists, of which well-known examples are Henri Fantin-Latour’s A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870), and the later Max Ernst’s Au Rendez Vous des Amis (1922).
17 Riegl, The Group, 80.
18 Macaulay characterizes the make-up of the board of Directors of the Glasgow School of Art as ‘nominated representatives from the town council, the university, medicine, the law, engineering, and shipbuilding as well as from the mercantile and trading communities’, Macaulay, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 159. The Building Committee as depicted in Newbery’s painting thus had a typical membership of Governors with, for example, the banker Sir William Bilsland (sixth from right), businessman Sir James Fleming (third from right), and town councillor James Mollison (eight from right), as well as added expertise from chartered architects D. Barclay (third from left), J.M. Munro (fifth from left), and governor J.J. Burnet (fifth from right).
19 Riegl, The Group, 64.
20 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.2, May 16, 1896.
21 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.6, May 11, 1896.
22 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.17, December 17, 1896.
23 GSAA 5/4/10.
24 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.20, December 17, 1896.
25 This reading of Mackintosh’s status has been widespread – in both the press, see for example art critic Clare Henry in The Glasgow Herald, Weekend Extra, May 18, 1996, p.2 ‘… he must for a time have felt persona non grata in strict Victorian Glasgow’, and p.3 ‘… widely misunderstood in his day: neglected after his death’, and in published monographs–see D.P. Bliss, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, p.7 ‘Undoubtedly Mackintosh’s reputation suffered from the flamboyant design and poor construction of the “Spook School” work with which his name was associated.’
26 Mackintosh studied at GSA on and off from 1883 to1895.
27 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 21 ‘…the legend that it was solely at Newbery’s insistence, and against bitter opposition, that Mackintosh won the competition’.
28 Evening Times, February 5, 1895.
29 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.20, January 13, 1897.
30 GSAA GOV 5/1/1, p.28, January 27, 1897.
31 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 35.
32 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 36.
33 Quoted in Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 36.
34 Macaulay, passim.
35 See GSA Annual Prospectus 1905, GSAA REG 1/1.
36 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 37.
37 Ibid., 48. ‘To accommodate Mackintosh a strip of canvass had had to be added to the side.’
38 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, p.67, January 15, 1907.
39 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, p.79, March 13, 1907.
40 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, p.70, January 22, 1907.
41 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, p.91 (insert), September 10, 1907.
42 Andor Gomme and David Walker, Architecture of Glasgow, London: 1962, pp.198, 143.
43 See GSA annual prospectuses: GSAA REG 1/1, and GSAA REG ½.
44 In architectural terminology the ‘programme’ is the setting out of the client’s needs in terms of architectural space and how it can be organized.
45 GSAA, SEC 35: James Pittendrigh McGillivray. ‘Report on School by Mr Pittendrigh McGillivray, RSA, 7 Dec. 1904’, June 29, 1905, pp.6–7.
46 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 36.
47 Andrew MacMillan, ‘A Modern Enigma’, in Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 51–73 at 66.
48 Pamela Robertson (ed.), Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Architectural Papers, Oxford: 1990, passim.
49 David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland from the 12th to the 18th centuries, reprint, Edinburgh:, 1971 (first published in 5 volumes, 1887–1892).
50 Frank Walker, ‘Scottish Baronial Architecture’ in Robertson, 29–63 at 38.
51 Walker, ‘Scottish Baronial Architecture’, 32.
52 Walker, ‘Scottish Baronial Architecture’, 33–5; Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, London: 1976, pp.59–87.
53 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.26, August 31, 1908.
54 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.30, September 29, 1908.
55 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.50, November 30, 1908.
56 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.54, December 8, 1908.
57 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.64, January 26, 1909 with reference to p.54, December 8, 1908.
58 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.64, January 26, 1909.
59 GSAA GOV 5/1/4, p.73, February 8, 1909.
60 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, p.118, February 7, 1908.
61 GSAA GOV 5/1/3, pp.127–8, February 27, 1908.
62 Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 42.
63 In a lecture given around 1892 to an unknown literary society (the editor David Walker suggests the Scottish Society of Literature and Art founded in 1886 in Glasgow, and refers to the lecture itself as ‘Untitled Paper on Architecture’) Mackintosh himself cites this definition of architecture but mistakenly assigns it to Madame De Stael: ‘When Gothe [sic] calls it a “petrified religion” or Madame de Stael “frozen music”’. The paper, and David Walker’s editorial, are published in Robertson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 153–80.
64 MacMillan, in Buchanan, ‘Mackintosh, Newbery’, 66.
65 Michel Foucault, ‘Des Espaces Autres’ in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite, October, 1984, translated as ‘Of Other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ by Jay Miskowiec, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.
66 John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’, New Left Review, I/42 (March-April 1967), 75–94 at 85.
67 Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’, 87.
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Notes on contributors
Johnny Rodger
Johnny Rodger is Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of Art. His latest book The Hero Building: an architecture of Scottish national identity was published by Ashgate in August 2015.