The Girls of Art Nouveau

I'm sad to admit that I never knew who Frances and Margaret MacDonald were until just recently.  Their art is the intersection of fantastical and Victorian, and in many ways their paintings seem to have emerged from a book of Celtic fairy tales or an Isadora Duncan dance.

All images from JSTOR.

Frances and Margaret were one half of the "Glasgow Four," a group of artists who came together in the 1890s at the Glasgow School of Art.  The other two members of the Four were Margaret's husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frances' husband Herbert MacNair. Together, the sisters and their spouses took an innovative approach to artwork that incorporated watercolors, mysticism, and nature, and Frances and Margaret were particularly innovative in their depiction of women.  They captured the feminine in a way that appealed to Victorian grace but contradicted Victorian rigidity, and the girls they painted took on the qualities of faeries.  

They drew from Victorian Puritanism and Celtic Spiritualism and created ground-breaking pieces. Elongated bodies and a characteristic dreamy palette are ever-present. Colors are light, neutral, metallic, natural and mythical at the same time. And yet, there are touches of modernity, like geometric symmetry and the use of squares. (Green)

Sadly, Frances died in 1921, at the age of 48.  It is suspected that her death was a suicide. Margaret made no known artwork after 1921, and she died in 1933. I can't help but to imagine that Margaret's reduction in productivity was at least in part related to the loss of her sister, and I'm grateful to have learned about the two of them and their beautiful work. Their paintings are like looking into a dream world--something fit for the Fairy Pools of Scotland's Isle of Skye!


<3 Frances

Further reading:

"Glasgow and After"

"Margaret MacDonald"

"The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau"