At the turn of the 20th Century, a group of Glasgow-based artists were producing stunning decorative work closely associated with the burgeoning Art Nouveau movement. One of those artists was an Englishman named Talwin Morris. His brief but prolific career was to have a profound influence on Scotland’s most famous artistic movement, the Glasgow Style.
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The 1890s were an important time for the development of commercial art. The industrial revolution had mechanised the production of posters and books, and artists were seeing these areas as legitimate forms of artistic expression. In Britain, William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement was flourishing. Its emphasis on nature and natural forms was beginning to influence and inspire European artists like Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt. In Britain's second city, the important shipbuilding centre of Glasgow, a group of students were developing their own response. Their ‘Glasgow Style’ would go on to form a unique and important approach to this new style of art, or Art Nouveau as it came to be known.
A young designer called Talwin Morris was living in London and working for a magazine called Black and White creating decorative mastheads in a style befitting his namesake William’s Arts and Crafts sensibilities. In 1893, Morris responded to an advertisement in The Times for an art manager with the Glasgow-based publishing firm of Blackie and Son. Blackie was known for producing popular and affordable books and, at the end of the 19th Century, there were more literate people in Britain than ever before. The Education Act of 1870 made primary school attendance compulsory, and this opened up books to the masses, including a large market for children and schools. The position asked for someone to ‘take charge of the scheming and production of book illustrations and decorations.’ There was nothing to suggest that Blackie was looking for a complete overhaul of the way they approached design, but over the next two decades, Talwin Morris would design and art direct an array of covers which would set Blackie and Son apart.
When Morris saw the vacancy, it is difficult to imagine him being aware of what was happening in Glasgow. It was too early in the development of the Glasgow Style. His decision to relocate was more likely inspired by the artistic opportunity being offered at Blackie, but his arrival in the city happened at the perfect time.
With his new wife Alice, Morris rented a house within the ruins of a 14th Century castle on the outskirts of the city overlooking the River Clyde. Far enough away to avoid the buzzing industrial hub of the city centre, but close enough to access Glasgow’s blossoming art scene. He quickly got to know the young artists who would become ‘The Four’: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert McNair. Margaret and Frances were sisters and met Mackintosh and McNair, who were both working as architects, at The Glasgow School of Art in 1892. Francis Newbery, the influential head of the School, had introduced them because he had recognised a similar innovative aesthetic to their work. Margaret and Frances would eventually marry Mackintosh and McNair respectively.
At the same time, influential English art magazine The Studio was launched. It was set up by Charles Holme, a rich Victorian industrialist and friend of Liberty & Co. founder Arthur Lasenby Liberty. Its aim was to promote the Arts and Crafts and developing Art Nouveau movements. The magazines produced at this time allowed artists to share and promote styles and ideas across Europe. The influence of The Studio, Ver Sacrum (the magazine of the Vienna Secessionists), Art et Decoration in France and Dekorative Kunst (the German magazine promoting ‘Jugendstil’ – ‘youth style’) should not be underestimated. Japan had also lessened their isolationist policies and opened up their art and culture to the world. Their simple strokes and forms were influencing fin-de-siècle European art, and this had a significant impact on Aubrey Beardsley’s pen and ink illustration and The Glasgow School of Art students.
In 1893, there were fledgling ideas springing up everywhere. Artists were being influenced by – and influencing – other artists. They were inviting each other to exhibit work, and a cross-pollination of style and thought was taking place.
Alphonse Mucha’s poster of actress Sarah Bernhardt is seen by many as the moment Art Nouveau first came to prominence, interestingly this was created in 1895, when many of the dominant features and symbols of the movement already existed in Beardsley’s illustrations and the infancy of the Glasgow Style. Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secessionists were founded in 1897. The elongated, willowy figures and sensual content were clearly influenced by Beardsley and the Pre-Raphaelites. We also know that Klimt admired the work of Margaret Macdonald, and the similarities in style are obvious. The aim to bring a modern freedom and freshness to 19th Century historicism was similar, but styles flexed and changed.
This cross-pollination was also occurring amongst the Glasgow artists. History has dictated that the Glasgow Style is most strongly identified with one figure, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The view has been that he innovated and others followed, but this has started to be questioned more closely. His wife Margaret Macdonald is now acknowledged as having played a greater role within the movement, and upon her husband’s work. We increasingly see her forms and styling present within Mackintosh’s art. He acknowledged this himself, ‘You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not three-quarters of them’ and he jointly attributed Macdonald when signing his later artworks. What hasn’t been fully explored is Talwin Morris’ influence upon Mackintosh and The Four. Morris’ most cited influential moment is introducing his boss Walter Blackie to Mackintosh. The result was undoubtedly significant – Mackintosh’s Hill House commission was his greatest residential achievement – but it was not the biggest impact Morris had on Mackintosh or the Glasgow Style.
Most studies of Morris’ work focus solely on his art and its widely-recognised motifs, because there is not much known about the man himself. There are no personal letters, there are no contemporary accounts, and most intriguingly, there isn’t even a photograph of him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two planned biographies came to nothing. This leaves very little of his ‘character’ to attribute to the work or a deeper understanding of the man to draw upon. This adds to Morris’ work being seen as following The Four and, most strongly, that of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Many of the attribution dates and records are incomplete, and for an artistic style that relies on a number of recurring symbols and motifs, this makes pinpointing the origin of stylistic forms particularly difficult.
At Blackie he was a prodigious designer and many of the book covers he designed were for titles that formed part of a series. Most covers had identical designs which joined up the series but didn’t necessarily relate to the subject matter of the book. The wonderful Red Letter Library series is an example of this. It was one of the earliest graphic forms of ‘serialisation’, and within the commercial world of book design and marketing this would be a significant development.
Like all of the Glasgow Style designers, the work is on the whole decorative, but there are subtle and clever references to the subject matter within many of Morris’ book cover designs. His cover for Katherine Tynan’s A Girl of Galway evokes a face and the fashion of the day for ladies to wear their hair up, all in subtle abstract thin strokes of swirls and straight lines. Modern House Construction resembles the entrance to a house, including columns and double doors. The Modern Carpenter and Joiner and Cabinet Maker resembles Mackintosh’s own furniture designs and the presciently modernist styling of Modern Power Generators evokes mechanised wheels and pistons.
In the same way that Margaret Macdonald influenced Mackintosh, you can see how Morris’ clean graphic lines and simplified forms informed the development of Mackintosh, particularly his commercial art. Morris is bringing Aubrey Beardsley’s Japanese-inspired simplicity to the Glasgow Style. The whiplash line and clean pen and ink styling are evident in many of Morris’ designs. He is also designing with a heightened sense of geometric and symmetrical form, particularly compared to the graphic styles of The Four. Both Mackintosh and Morris had trained as architects, but it’s interesting that Talwin Morris’ commercial design has a more structured and draughtsman-like quality than Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s. The frame is an important feature of the Glasgow Style, and even in his Black and White days, Morris was required to design within a framing device for his masthead illustrations. Mackintosh applied a more ‘artistic’ free-flowing style similar to the Macdonald sisters, and much of his illustration and watercolours contain images of ethereal, waif-like women. This imagery is more closely aligned with the Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley and what was happening in Europe. Morris rarely included human forms. Mackintosh’s architecture and furniture design was by its nature more linear. These of course have a more pragmatic foundation in both function and the materials used, and Mackintosh exhibiting less freedom and more structure is expected.
Mackintosh is mirroring Morris’ more simple graphics within architectural constraints, while Morris is mirroring Mackintosh’s architectural forms within his cover design. Their shared influences and styles informed their work. The artists of the Glasgow Style were friends and respected each other’s work. In 1897, Morris wrote an unpublished appreciation of The Four, possibly intended for The Studio. Morris championed the other artists. As an art director, Morris had the vision to commission artists like Ethel Larcome, Jessie M King and the Silver Studio, all recognised as influential contributors to the Style. Morris himself designed furniture and interiors, remodelled the entrance to the Blackie and Son headquarters and designed items for Liberty & Co.
Due to the accessibility of his book covers, Talwin Morris’ art was by far the most widely seen of all the Glasgow artists. He exhibited three of his covers at the prestigious Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the New Gallery, London. His work was praised in The Studio (including his interior designs), he was asked to design the cover for Dekorative Kunst, and along with other artists of the Glasgow Style, exhibited at the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna held in Turin. History has placed him behind The Four, but his influence then, and legacy now, is arguably greater than that of Frances Macdonald and Herbert McNair.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous 1896 poster design for The Scottish Musical Review is graphically clean and simple with stylised symmetrical songbirds and geometric forms – perhaps more Morris than Mackintosh in style. In fact one of Talwin Morris’ most recognised motifs is his simple, and strikingly similar, design of facing songbirds. Alternatives of this turn up on a number of his covers, and no definite date is available for when Morris designed his version of the motif. Was it before or after Mackintosh’s poster? Interestingly, the copy of Mackintosh’s poster in Glasgow Museums was left to them by Morris’ widow, Alice. The three books exhibited by Talwin Morris at the New Gallery in 1896 show his trademark simplicity of line and symmetry. They show how Morris’ work had evolved from Arts and Crafts in London to Art Nouveau in Glasgow.
Recurring symbols and motifs are a defining feature of Art Nouveau and the Glasgow Style. The rose, songbird, heart, tear drop are all instantly recognisable, particularly in the distinct form they take in the hands of the Glasgow artists. They are so prevalent that to suggest sole-authorship is as dismissive as saying the other artists are merely derivative.
It is also important to note that Morris and Mackintosh were developing similar styles of modern san-serif lettering. Mackintosh’s forms appear more stylised and idiosyncratic, while Morris’ lettering is more uniform and structured – although unmistakeable characteristic, particularly in the form of his ‘U’ and ‘N’. Both artists used capitals and a sub-script ‘o’. Sometimes Morris would add some of Mackintosh’s renowned double lines and square embellishments to his lettering, and Mackintosh’s type evolved towards less characterisation in the style of Morris. Morris’ lettering had initially conformed to the script styling of Victorian book covers, but as his design progressed his simple typography was one of the features of Blackie cover design.
Talwin Morris’ artwork was transferred to brass plates and these were then letterpress printed on paper covers or transferred as gilt decoration onto cloth. Many covers had extra colours applied by blocking in flat colour with woodblocks, a technique which was relatively new at the time. Aluminium was also developed for adding silver gilt in addition to the established black and gold. Mechanisation had enabled high quality production in larger quantities and the period up to the First World War was the pinnacle of the decorated cloth binding era. The results were beautiful, and remarkable for books that were cheap and plentiful. Morris signed his work with both a monogram of his initials and the more subtle motif of either one dot followed by two dots or the other way around. This form was inspired by the Morse code dashes of his initials.
In 1898, Blackie and Son started a subsidiary publishing arm called Gresham specialising in scientific and technical books. Talwin Morris was appointed to oversee the design of its covers and his influence on Blackie’s style was now absolute. Morris and his wife Alice, moved to larger premises in Glasgow and their friendships and connections in the city were strong. Both Francis Newbury and Mackintosh were regular visitors to their house ‘Torwood’. By 1909, Morris’ health was failing and at the height of his influence he resigned from his position at Blackie and Son. He subsequently died of a cardiac embolism in 1911 at the age of 45. Alice asked his friend Mackintosh to design the headstone.
By the beginning of the First World War, the Art Nouveau movement was almost over. It had finished before it really took off and its ethereal imagery and increasingly fanciful stylings felt more and more alien as Europe headed towards destruction. The end wasn’t kind to The Four. Their style was out of favour and they struggled to get further commissions. They found it difficult to break the connection to a movement they were so closely bound. All of The Four died in relative poverty and obscurity, and their reputations would only be restored decades later. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is now rightly revered, his work is groundbreaking and beautiful. The other artists associated with the Glasgow Style are also seeing their work appreciated and reappraised, particularly Margaret Macdonald. For Talwin Morris, his output at Blackie and Son made the Glasgow Style known amongst the wider public and his design and direction influenced the movement in Britain and Europe. The acknowledgment of his work continues to position him as a major artist in a movement he championed so passionately.
Jerry Cinamon, ‘Talwin Morris Checklist’ in Private Library, Vol.3:1, 1990
Jerry Cinamon, ‘Talwin Morris and Me’ in CRM Society Newsletter, 2011
Duncan Chappell, Talwin Morris: An Annotated Bibliography, 2017
Lyle Ford, 'The Art Nouveau book designs of Talwin Morris' in Amphora, No.135, 2004
Fiona MacSporran, ‘Talwin Morris’, in Baseline, No.23, 1997
E B S, 'Mr Talwin Morris's Designs for Cloth Bindings' in The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, No.15, 1899
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Glasgow School of Art Library, Talwin Morris Collection