Glasgow School

The Glasgow School usually refers to the circle of artists and designers who worked around the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow from the mid-1890s to about 1910. Its central group was the so-called Four: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair. Their style combined elements of Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Celtic motifs and Japanese art to form a distinctive aesthetic of elongated vertical lines, stylised plant forms and geometric austerity. This Glasgow Style embraced architecture, furniture, stained glass, metalwork, textiles and graphic design, and became Scotland's contribution to the international Art Nouveau movement. The best-known monuments of the school are the Glasgow School of Art building designed by Mackintosh and a series of tea rooms decorated in the style. The term Glasgow School is sometimes also used more broadly for a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape painters known as the Glasgow Boys. The school exerted considerable influence on European design, especially on the Vienna Secession.