Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
From about 1900, Margaret Macdonald began to produce larger, independent watercolors alongside her craftwork. Here, a figure is seemingly asleep and may be dreaming, while above her stands a row of eight heads or masks that are perhaps part of her dream. The subject may have been inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, The Blue Bird, which was performed in Glasgow in Autumn 1910. Also, stylistically it owes much to the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the Dutch artist Jan Toorop, both of whom had a huge impact on Glasgow artists at the time. In 1912, Macdonald exhibited the work alongside two other watercolors in Edinburgh. They were very well received, with a reviewer for the Glasgow Herald considering them “decoratively exotic fantasies born as it were in another sphere.”
We present today's piece thanks to the National Galleries of Scotland. <3
More on the art of the Macdonald sisters you can read here.
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