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| Conservation work being undertaken on the Heart of the Rose panel at Graciela Ainsworth |
Margaret Macdonald’s The Heart of the Rose is immediately recognisable as what has become known as “Glasgow Style”. It is also a particularly significant example her innovative and experimental approach to art and design. However, until its recent conservation no-one knew just how innovative the GSA’s Heart of the Rose panel was.
Only two panels bearing the design were ever made. One belonged to a Viennese patron and was displayed in an interior exhibit – The Rose Boudoir - at the International Exposition of Modern Art in Turin in 1902,. The second was made for a private house in Glasgow. The latter was donated to The Glasgow School of Art in 1952.
The GSA panel, which is just under 1m x 1m in size, has just undergone restoration at Graciela Ainsworth in Edinburgh, and during restoration work an exciting discovery was made that sheds a whole new light on Macdonald and Mackintosh’s creative practice.
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| Margaret Macdonald (courtesy of GSA Archives / T & R Annan & Sons Ltd) |
“A hugely influential and acclaimed, artist and designer in her time, and an acknowledged expert in the creation of gesso panels, Macdonald has somewhat unfairly been eclipsed by her husband,” says Dr Robyne Calvert, Mackintosh Research Fellow at the GSA, an internationally respected expert on the collaborative work of Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. “Recently scholars have worked to redress this imbalance, which I think Mackintosh himself would have appreciated, as she was vital to his creative practice. Indeed Mackintosh told her, in a personal letter,‘’You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not threequarters [sic] in them...”
“During the restoration of the GSA’s The Heart of the Rose panel conservators have discovered that it is unique among her other extant gesso panels in that it was made by an entirely different process. The discovery gives us a whole new insight into the method and philosophy of Macdonald and Mackintosh’s shared design practice.”
Macdonald made several ‘gesso panels’ for interiors designed by, and sometimes with, Mackintosh. The panels were made similarly to the method for wall frescoes: plaster was layered onto a support such as wood or canvas, then finished with piped plaster in linear relief, paint, and sometimes set with various inexpensive mixed media such as twine, shells, and embroidery beads.
The conservation of the GSA panel, however, has now revealed that it was created as a single plaster cast with pigment applied to the surface (rather than mixed into the plaster layers).
“This discovery is supported by the catalogue for the Turin exhibition, which indicated that duplicates could be made of the Macdonald-Mackintosh designs to be purchased by interested buyers. What the restoration of this panel has revealed is that not only were they were willing to make multiples of their designs, but had indeed created a system of doing so in hopeful anticipation of such commissions,” adds Dr Calvert “This exciting discovery gives us deeper insight into the way Macdonald worked, and what the Mackintoshes hoped to achieve with their interior design practice: they were happy to duplicate their designs in an innovative way, without being overly precious about reworking them to suit the needs of their patrons. They wanted to work.”
The GSA’s Heart of the Rose Panel will go back on display in the temporary furniture gallery in the Reid Building from 15 March 2016. Public access via one of the Mackintosh at the GSA tours which run three times a day, seven days a week.
Ends 8 March 2016
For further information, images and interviews
contact: Lesley Booth
0779 941 4474
press@gsa.ac.uk
contact: Lesley Booth
0779 941 4474
press@gsa.ac.uk
Notes for Editors
- The Heart of the Rose panel was removed from The Mackintosh Building in May 2014 by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.
- The Heart of The Rose Panel was last restored in the 1950s. The current work has been planned for some time and is not related to the fire.
Margaret Macdonald
Margaret Macdonald was one of the most gifted and successful women artists in Scotland at the turn of the century. Her output was wide-ranging and included watercolours, graphics, metalwork and textiles. Arguably her greatest achievements were in gesso, a plaster-based medium, which she used to make decorative panels for furniture and interiors.
Macdonald was born in England and came to Glasgow with her family around 1890. She enrolled as a day student at Glasgow School of Art where she met Mackintosh and Herbert McNair. She left the School in the mid 1890s and set up an independent studio in the city with her sister, Frances. Margaret Macdonald The sisters worked together until Frances’s marriage and departure for Liverpool in 1899. Mackintosh and Macdonald married in 1900.
Collaboration was key to Margaret Macdonald’s creativity. The partnership with her sister in the 1890s produced metalwork, graphics, and a series of book illustrations. Her collaboration with Mackintosh comprised primarily the production of panels for interiors and furniture, notably for the tea rooms and The Hill House. The precise nature of their partnership is difficult to define, because little documentation survives. However it is certain that Macdonald played an important role in the development of the decorative, symbolic interiors of the early 1900s.
Ill health and the strain of Mackintosh’s declining career contributed to a decline in her own output and no work after 1921 is known. Macdonald died in London in 1933, five years after her husband.
Conservation of the panel
· In order to clean the surface of the panel several trials were made to test the behaviour of different solvents and methods. Finally a mixture of white spirit with Dehypon LS45 with a very low percentage of IMS and acetone was found the most appropriate method. The cleaning of the whole panel was made using swabs of cotton wool, removing any remain of product and always neutralizing afterwards with white spirit.
· After the cleaning, chips and losses of paint and substrate were filled using traditional gesso made of sulphate calcic and animal glue.
· Finally the white gesso fills were retouched using fine artists water colour.