CLUB DE REINAS | Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (British artist) 1864 - 1933
One of Four Queens (Queen of Clubs), 1909
wood, paint, gesso
58.1 x 40.01 cm. (22.88 x 15.75 in.)
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, United States of America

Catalogue Note The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
One of four gessos by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh for the card room at Hous'hill, near Glasgow -see GLAHA 52605 - 52608. Hous'hill was the home of Mackintosh's important patron, the Glasgow tea room entrepreneur, Catherine Cranston. He decorated and furnished the principal interiors of her home, Hous'hill, around 1904.

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Margaret Macdonald (1864 – 1933) was one of the most gifted and successful women artists in Scotland at the turn of the century. Her output was wide-ranging and included watercolours, graphics, metalwork and textiles. Arguably her greatest achievements were in gesso, a plaster-based medium, which she used to make decorative panels for furniture and interiors.

Macdonald was born in England and came to Glasgow with her family around 1890. With her sister Frances she enrolled as a day student at Glasgow School of Art where she met Mackintosh and Herbert McNair. She left the School in the mid 1890s and set up an independent studio in the city with her sister.

The sisters worked together until Frances's marriage and departure for Liverpool in 1899. Mackintosh and Macdonald married in 1900.

Collaboration was key to Margaret Macdonald's creativity. The partnership with her sister in the 1890s produced metalwork, graphics, and a series of book illustrations. Her collaboration with Mackintosh comprised primarily the production of decorative panels for interiors and furniture, notably for the tea rooms and The Hill House. The precise nature of their artistic partnership is difficult to define, because little documentation survives. However it is certain that Macdonald played an important role in the development of the decorative, symbolic interiors of the early 1900s, including the House for an Art Lover portfolio, the Rose Boudoir, Turin and the Willow Tea Rooms. Ill health and the strain of Mackintosh's declining career contributed to a decline in her own output and no work after 1921 is known, though she produced an impressive group of late symbolist watercolours. Macdonald died in London in 1933, five years after her husband.