In the second half of the nineteenth century Glasgow became a major industrial and trading centre, recognised, after London, as the second city of the British Empire. A vibrant cultural life evolved during this period of prosperity, and among the many artists and designers to emerge during these years, one small group, centred on the city’s School of Art, developed what has now become world famous as the ‘Glasgow style’. Of these, the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (see no.76) remains by far the best known, but his wife Margaret Macdonald also made a very significant contribution as a designer and a painter. Much of her work involved crafts such as needlework, metalwork and gesso panels. In the 1890s she designed graphics and a series of book illustrations with her younger sister Frances Macdonald. Her partnership with Mackintosh involved the production of decorative panels for interiors and furniture, notably for the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow and the Hill House in Helensburgh. However, she also produced a number of watercolours, including The Mysterious Garden which is arguably her masterpiece in this medium.

Margaret Macdonald was born in Tipton, Staffordshire where her father was an engineer and colliery manager. On his retirement in 1890, the family moved back to his native Glasgow where both Margaret and Frances enrolled in the School of Art. There the sisters met Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Herbert MacNair, and by 1894 this group was already known as ‘The Four’, collaborating closely on graphics and interior design work. Margaret subsequently married Charles Rennie Mackintosh and her sister married MacNair.

In 1898 Macdonald was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. The Mysterious Garden was shown at the Society’s exhibition in Glasgow in 1911 and again the following year in Edinburgh. Contemporary critics admired ‘the beautiful play of hyacinth blues’ and the ‘bewitching harmonies of colour’ but were somewhat bewildered by the ‘strangeness’ of the work and the lack of any narrative explanation for the fairy-like figure or the row of mask-like heads above. The subject is probably deliberately vague and allusive. For several decades, symbolist artists across Europe had been moving away from realism and naturalism, turning instead to the world of the imagination, finding inspiration in wide-ranging literary sources from folklore to fairy tales. With its iridescent surface of transparent watercolour and its enigmatic subject, The Mysterious Garden combines the melancholic mood of the nineteenth-century cult of beauty with the decorative, fantasy forms of Art Nouveau. It has been suggested that it may have been inspired by a performance in Glasgow in 1910 of the play The Blue Bird by the Belgian poet and dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Drawing on traditions of romance and the fairy tale, this play was a huge popular success and there are certainly parallels between its dreamlike, mysterious mood and the haunting atmosphere of Macdonald’s watercolour.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.