Glasgow style in Liverpool.(Report from Europe)

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is a household name, and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, is also well known. Less familiar are Margaret's sister Frances and her husband, J. Herbert McNair, who both made a considerable contribution to what became known as the Glasgow style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Macdonald sisters met their husbands at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1890s. The quartet all worked in graphic design, metalwork, and furniture making as well as watercolors. William Morris was so impressed by the women's skills that he commissioned them to illustrate a book of his poems. From 1899 to 1909 the McNairs lived in Liverpool, where he taught design at the newly established City of Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art, an institution that shared Glasgow's multidisciplinary approach and belief in the unity of the crafts, and she collaborated with him on various projects and developed new skills in jewelry and textile design.

Sadly, the Liverpool school's applied arts department closed in 1905, and ...