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  • Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair
  • John Morrison (bio)
Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair, edited by Pamela Robertson; pp. 191. Aldershot and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2006, £40.00, $80.00.

Doves and Dreams: The Art of Frances Macdonald and J. Herbert McNair is a companion volume to the exhibition of the same name that took place in the Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow, in 2006 and in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in 2007. Essays by Juliet Kinchin and Joseph Sharples, Pamela Robertson, Janice Helland, and Annette Carruthers occupy nearly one-third of the book, while the remainder consists of a catalogue raisonné of the work of Macdonald and McNair. The four essays deal in turn with the cultural milieux of Glasgow and Liverpool where the husband and wife designers McNair and Macdonald spent their active working lives, the lives and work produced by the two during their time in the two cities, their whole room designs, and finally their three-dimensional designs.

Robertson's preface explains that the lives and work of Macdonald and McNair have not been thoroughly or consistently examined or documented and, further, that the present volume draws on new research and recently discovered works to present the first comprehensive survey of the achievements of the two artists. The book deals centrally with the decade from 1895, the most active period of their professional lives. It discusses only briefly the well-worn tale of their involvement with Frances's sister Margaret Macdonald and Margaret's husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the informal grouping known as "The Four," and offers a short summary of Macdonald's and McNair's lives after 1909. Macdonald died in 1921 leaving little extant work from the last decade of her life. McNair, who may have destroyed much of his wife's later work, died in 1955 having ceased active work as a designer more than thirty years earlier.

The essay by Kinchin and Sharples compares Liverpool and Glasgow, the two sites of the artists' careers, mainly to the detriment of the former city. While both cities are portrayed as commercially successful and confident metropolises, Glasgow is identified as a more diverse, cosmopolitan city with a vibrant visual culture and an evolving aesthetic language of its own, while Liverpool, with occasional exceptions, is revealed as a provincial centre with a narrower economic and cultural base. Interestingly, Glasgow's relative sophistication is linked explicitly to the city's status within the nation of Scotland, and Liverpool's to its less-exalted station within England. This analysis of the visual culture of British cities as simultaneously congruent because of their Britishness, but distinct by virtue of their older identities as English or Scottish, is worthy of further exploration.

Robertson's piece chronologically follows the careers of Macdonald and McNair, beginning with their initial critical success in Glasgow and McNair's apppointment as instructor in design in the newly established School of Architecture and Applied Art at University College Liverpool in 1898. The pair's activities in the ultimately less-receptive environment of Liverpool, their marriage in 1899, parenthood in 1900, interior decoration of their Studio-featured flat in 1901, and participation in international exhibitions across Europe, are documented through to the artists' impecunious return to Glasgow in 1908, following the disadvantageous restructuring of McNair's teaching post and the collapse of his family fortune.

Helland's treatise is at a tangent to the others. Rather than chronologically or contextually grounded, she explores theoretically the "conflation of art and life" in Arts and Crafts design and McDonald and McNair's construction of their "domestic [End Page 720] interiors as mirrors of their art practices" (56–57). The parallel theme of the undermining of the tradition of gender-specific spaces makes this the most speculative, challenging, and ultimately most interesting of the four essays. There is a sense here that, faced with a paucity of evidence, every last ounce of meaning is wrung out of the available material, both documentary and visual.

Carruthers's contribution, in contrast, is the most descriptive. It documents the artists' three-dimensional design work and concentrates on establishing...

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