Charles Rennie Mackintosh - The Glasgow Style Gallery
The Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Glasgow Style gallery at Kelvingrove is divided into six ‘stories’ or themes comprising: An Introduction to the Glasgow Style; Glasgow Tearooms; The Macdonald Sisters; Precious Things; Craft, Art and Industry and Women Adored, Women Adorned.
Between around 1890-1920, Glasgow was the home of an art and design movement now called ‘The Glasgow Style’. The interest in traditional techniques and the use of strong clean abstract forms, shapes and lines make the movement the Scottish contemporary of European Art Nouveau and English Arts and Crafts.
Kelvingrove boasts the city’s largest display of the Glasgow Style’s wide range of media and techniques such as: stained glass, works on paper, textiles and embroidery, jewellery, repoussé metalwork, silver, enamelwork, glass, gesso, furniture and interiors.
The gallery introduces the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his Glasgow Style contemporaries through an exploration of work featuring their favoured forms and motifs and tells the story of two key female artists and designers: Macdonald Sisters.
It also features early Glasgow Tearoom designs, furniture and fittings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and fellow Glasgow designer George Walton for Mackintosh’s greatest patron - tearoom entrepreneur Miss Catherine Cranston.
One of the major highlights is the display of sections, furniture and fittings from Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms - the largest tearoom complex designed solely by Mackintosh - which is currently being restored by Glasgow Museums.
Precious Things showcases the range of metalwork, enamelwork and glassware designed and produced between 1880-1920 by students of the Glasgow School of Art and their contemporaries working in Scotland.
Craft, Art and Industry recounts the relationship between the Glasgow School of Art’s designers and the City of Glasgow’s industry while Women Adored, Women Adorned shows how the female form was represented and clothed by the Glasgow Style artist.