Lyon & Turnbull
'The Immortals': back row: Frances Macdonald; middle row (left to right): Margaret Macdonald, Katherine Cameron, Janet Aitken, Agnes Raeburn, Jessie Keppie, John Keppie; front row (left to right): Herbert McNair, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Photo: The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections.
After marrying Herbert MacNair in 1899 Frances joined him in Liverpool, where he was an instructor at the University School of Architecture and Applied Art, and together they furnished and decorated a rented house at 54 Oxford Street. In 1905 the University transferred its Applied Art department, where MacNair worked, to the Municipal Art School; MacNair left the new school shortly afterwards and helped establish an independent school in the city, the Sandon Studios. MacNair never really made enough money to keep his family while he was at the Sandon but he was cushioned by funds from his family in Scotland. Around 1908, however, that source of income faltered (and eventually disappeared in 1909 with his family’s bankruptcy) and Herbert and Frances, with their young son Sylvan, returned to Glasgow. What followed was a very disruptive period for them all. Frances managed to find part-time teaching at the School of Art, encouraged and supported by Fra Newbery, but Herbert found it impossible to find work as a teacher and his income as an artist dwindled further. They held a joint show at the Baillie Gallery in London in 1911 but sales were few. Herbert reportedly took to drink and various temporary jobs, for which he was almost always unsuited, and by 1913 he was in Canada, alone, his passage reputedly financed by the Macdonald family in an attempt to rescue Frances from the growing misery of their life together. Frances moved between Glasgow and
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Liverpool, again alone, trying unsuccessfully to establish herself as a teacher of embroidery - having left the Glasgow School of Art where she was an assistant to Anne Macbeth, the head of embroidery, whose methods and attitude to ‘artistic’ embroidery were completely at odds with Frances’s own. MacNair returned to Glasgow in 1914, by now an alcoholic, and found work at the Post Office; in the same year Frances’s mother died and her sister, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, left Glasgow for the south of England. Few paintings or pieces of metalwork survive from the period after she arrived in Glasgow in 1908 and before her death (a possible suicide) in 1921 - the only coherent group is of seven paintings, probably produced after 1911 as they do not seem to have been included in the Baillie Gallery Exhibition. (Sleep has been identified with a work in this exhibition, and also as Eve, but there is nothing about this lot that identifies it as being the painting shown in 1911. The titles of all seven paintings in this group have been passed down through family tradition - they may not be titles ascribed by the artist. The Macdonald family obviously had an association with, and possession of, these paintings before Frances’s death as Herbert is believed to have destroyed all of Frances’s and his own surviving work after her death.) These seven watercolours, all roughly the same size and having a similar handling, are generally interpreted as reflecting the