Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Margaret MacDonald, Ladies' Luncheon Room from Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tearooms, c. 1900
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The Glasgow tearooms designed, entirely or in part, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh rank among the most innovative spaces produced during the art nouveau years. The projects benefited from a client who sought out originality. Although Catherine Cranston herself continued to wear nineteenth-century-style dress until she died in 1934, she wanted her tearooms to have the look of modernity, something that may surprise today, when the very word "tearoom" suggests a certain fustiness. But in Glasgow around 1900, tearooms were still relatively new, and they represented a modern alternative to male- and alcohol-dominated pubs and clubs. Tearooms were part of an expanding public space available to women at the end of the nineteenth century. For Kate Cranston, also a temperance supporter, the art nouveau style of her tearooms was an expression of innovation and a part of social change.
Miss Cranston was Mackintosh's most important patron, and over the course of several years he and his wife, Margaret MacDonald, produced designs for four of her establishments as well as for her home. In them they tried to achieve a total environment, specifying lighting, furniture, decorations, table settings, menu cards, even the waitresses' uniforms.
The image illustrates the reconstruction of the Ladies' Luncheon Room in Miss Cranston's Ingram Street tearoom. The spare, light walls (dark colors were generally held to be more "masculine") are punctuated by a regular series of square panels echoing small cutouts in the chairs. As described by English architect Edwin Luytens, it is "all very elaborately simple." Tall chair backs afforded some privacy in the open room. The design supports a sense of both public and domestic space. It combined the niceties of home with the excitement of being out in the world.
The unusual verticality of the chairs also draws attention to the decoration high on the wall. The metal relief, The Dew, is by MacDonald, and the larger gesso mural, The Wassail, by Mackintosh. The latter shows three pairs of young women with long podlike bodies, floating as if in amber, frozen in some ancient and mysterious procession. A romantic thrall with Scotland's misty past coincided with the aims of symbolism, and the works of Glasgow artists had strong symbolist underpinnings.
As Mackintosh's friend and collaborator Herbert MacNair noted, "not a line was drawn without purpose, and rarely was a single motif employed that had not some allegorical meaning." The flowers, blood-red forms allied to those of the women's bodies, probably suggest themes of creation and regeneration. These "ghoul-like designs" were not universally admired, however, and earned Glasgow artists the nickname the "Spook School." It is not entirely clear what patrons of the tearoom might have thought of these decorations. But even if the visitors did not actually decipher their multilayered symbolism, the works would have helped underscore the modernity of the design and the new kind of space they decorated.
Learning Activities
Art
• Identify a coffee house in your town that you feel projects a "modern" feel. How it is accomplished?
• Research directions of influence among Glasgow, Vienna, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Design a chair to provide privacy in a public waiting room.
| Glasgow and Vienna Opinion differs about whether the rectilinear style that evolved in Vienna was inspired by the work of Mackintosh, or whether the reverse was true. Mackintosh and MacDonald were invited to show at the eighth Secession exhibition, and their "Scottish Room" was highly praised. Yet squares had already figured prominently in Secession interiors designed by Josef Hoffmann. |