The Glasgow Girls: Frances MacDonald MacNair
Bows, 1910s (late)
pencil and watercolour, heightened with touches of bodycolour, with scratching‑out on vellum
34.6 × 30.5 cm
auctioned at Christie’s in 2018 for GBP 43,750

Frances MacDonald MacNair remains one of the most quietly compelling figures among the Glasgow Girls, and a central member of the original “Four” at the Glasgow School of Art—her husband Herbert MacNair, her sister Margaret MacDonald, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Even within this famously avant‑garde circle, Frances’s imagination moved toward a more ethereal, symbolist register: the shimmer of Scottish folklore, elongated female forms, and a delicately charged emotional atmosphere.

By the 1910s her career had entered a more fragile phase. Public interest had waned, commissions were scarce, and she produced relatively little in these later years. Yet the works that survive—Bows among them—show an artist who continued to refine her vision with remarkable tenderness and restraint.

The significance of Bows is heightened by its rarity. After Frances’s premature death in 1921, her grieving husband destroyed a large portion of her remaining works in anguish. As a result, only a small number of late pieces survive, and within that small group Bows stands out for its unusually direct engagement with female sexuality.

Frances often used bows, flowers, and repeating decorative motifs to soften or partially veil the female body. Here, however, those same motifs shift in purpose: they draw the eye rather than divert it. The bows gently emphasise the curves of the breast, the narrowing waist, and the subtle flare of the hips. It is a deliberate, quietly assertive gesture—an artist acknowledging the body with clarity rather than concealment.

Her personal story deepens the resonance of this shift. Frances entered the Glasgow School of Art at seventeen, continued her artistic practice after marriage, and later supported Herbert when he lost his teaching post. Though she never positioned her art as explicitly political, she was acutely aware of the changing expectations surrounding femininity at the turn of the century. Her symbolic, dreamlike settings allowed her to explore those tensions obliquely, without direct confrontation.

In Bows, that exploration becomes more pointed. It is a rare late work that survives against the odds—lyrical, intimate, and quietly courageous in its treatment of the female form.

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