Art, Learning, Arsenic, and Architecture
For all it can seem a grid of endless traffic, Glasgow is determinedly a place of art. Signs of this throng the city centre—from the thick-haired portrait bust of Beethoven at the back of a former piano factory on Renfrew Street to the sculpted lineup of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and others that now forms part of the Mitchell Library. Yet the evidence for Glasgow as a hub of culture lies even more in its present-day people. It is they who provide the staff, the base, and the infrastructure for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Scottish Opera, as well as for the National Theatre of Scotland. All of these, please note, are headquartered in Glasgow rather than in the Scottish capital. Proud of their democratic book culture, Glaswegians have been glimpsed more than once sitting in buses or trains while hunched over Kafka. They make more pilgrimages to art galleries than to football matches, and one of the most consistently popular visitor attractions in Scotland is the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, in the parklands at Kelvingrove.
As with so many other Glaswegian institutions, the origins of Kelvingrove’s spectacular museum are bound up with the city’s Victorian past. Those origins also owe something to rivalry with Edinburgh. Kelvingrove Park, beside the River Kelvin in the city’s west end, was the site of vast exhibitions in 1888, 1901, and 1911. The first of these, attended by six million people (more than the entire Scottish population), was the Glasgow International Exhibition. Well aware that Edinburgh had held its own International Exhibition two years earlier, Glaswegians succeeded in outdoing it. Their chosen site, Kelvingrove Park, had been laid out in 1853 in fields previously occupied by thatched cottages. Intending a show-stopping, profitable spectacle sufficient to fund a new art gallery, local architect James Sellar erected in 1888 “Baghdad by Kelvinside”—a hybrid architectural array of temporary exhibition buildings drawing on Byzantine as well as North African and Indian styles.
In Britain’s imperial heyday, this was empire as spectacle. One crowd-pulling exhibit was Robert Gibb’s painting The Thin Red Line, showing Glaswegian Colin Campbell’s Scottish Highland troops defending the Empire at the Battle of Balaclava. Other exhibits spoke to Glasgow’s place in imperial trade. “Tobacco girls” each produced up to 2,000 handmade cigarettes a day. About three dozen Clyde shipyards displayed the largest collection of model vessels ever seen: these included miniature versions of a steam yacht built on the Clyde for the Russian czar, and the world’s largest merchant steamship, City of New York—again Clyde-built. On a site overlooked by a replica of the bishop’s castle that had once stood near Glasgow Cathedral, distant imperial territories from India and Ceylon to Australia and Jamaica displayed their goods, produce, and even their people. On a visit to the exhibition, Queen Victoria, Empress of India and sovereign of all the Empire, met the Glaswegian organizing committee, whose members included the distinguished local physicist later ennobled as Lord Kelvin. At Kelvingrove, Her Majesty sat on a royal dais. Specially constructed and arranged on four descending levels, this structure measured thirty by twenty feet. Enthroned on it, the British monarch was herself Glasgow’s rarest imperial exhibit. The city never saw her again.
Profits from the municipal extravaganza of 1888 bankrolled the splendidly adorned red-sandstone art museum. The centre of the building’s north façade is somewhat improbably modeled on the Spanish Baroque cathedral of Santiago di Compostela; the composition is ornamented with statues of St. Mungo and of spirited figures representing everything from Painting and Sculpture to the Industries of Glasgow at the court of the Roman god Mercury. Inside, a soaring, marble-floored main hall is wonderfully over the top. It features a giant, carved Glasgow coat of arms, and has the names of the city’s trades blazoned on an arcade of piers. Proud of its Glaswegian workers, the great central hall is also decorated with the names of thirty-six international composers and boasts an elevated Victorian organ. This vast instrument was restored in 1988; it has 2,889 working pipes, but those visible on its elaborate walnut front are purely decorative. First played in 1901, the organ is still the star of regular free concerts which, like the surrounding building, feature a typically Glaswegian mixture of high culture and inclusive populism. Squealing children and rapt old ladies gaze at television monitors to see close-ups of the organist’s footwork.
47. Opened in 1901, the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, at Kelvingrove, is modelled in part on the Spanish Baroque cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. While admiring works by Titian, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Matisse, visitors can enjoy free concerts played on the gallery’s elevated Victorian organ, which boasts 2,889 working pipes.
The Glasgow Art Galleries, arguably the city’s best-loved public space, were fully renovated in 2009, their display areas extended, and their exhibits rearranged in a dazzling postmodern baroque. A Spitfire aircraft hangs suspended from wires in midair between the balconies of the western hall, flying low over taxidermied animals and a dizzying array of other exhibits. To those who blanche at such hybrid clutter, it can be pointed out that this challenging mixture is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the huge International Exhibition in Kelvingrove Park in 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, when the building was first opened. At that time the galleries, which some thought vulgar and “far too much a casino,” were marketed robustly as containing “the greatest art Collection ever gathered under one roof.”
Crowds flocked to see not just paintings, but exhibits of bookbinding, machine guns, sugar-processing technology (in those days, Glasgow made 80 percent of the world’s sugar-refining equipment), full-size locomotives from the city’s three main manufacturers (who amalgamated in 1903 to form the largest locomotive builders in Britain), and fresh eggs from the St. Mungo Poultry Company. There was, as well, a global jumble of wonders: not just highlights from the British Empire, but also a Japanese garden, a Russian village designed by an admirer of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (who also exhibited), and, from the United States, the vibrantly percussive band of John Philip Sousa. Visitors ranged from British royalty and His Majesty the Crown Prince of Siam to more publicity-shy locals, such as courting couples who carefully sought places in the shrubbery where they would not be illuminated by the festive searchlights that played regularly across the park.
It is easy to smile at these showy International Exhibitions that attended the construction of the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, but they were supremely successful. The 1901 displays attracted well over eleven million people. A decade later, when the new buildings played their part in the park’s Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art, and Industry, more than nine million flocked to see everything from Flora Macdonald’s slippers to a full-size working “ærial railway,” which took giddy visitors “flying across the Kelvin” in a dirigible with a large, basket-like compartment adventurously suspended below it. The buildings of the 1911 exposition were a pre-Disney Disneyland of big temporary castles, closely modeled on Scottish originals, and even a pastiche Auld Toon, or Olde Toun, complete with an enticing “Olde Toffee Shoppe.” After all of the above had been deflated, unbolted, disassembled, and cleared away, the Art Galleries stayed on and prospered.
This imposing sandstone structure had a narrow escape from Nazi bombing in 1941, when a shell landed nearby, badly damaging a group of statues on a bridge over the Kelvin. That same night, as firewatchers kept a lookout from the roof-space above Glasgow University’s Bute Hall, 260 bombers blitzed the Clydeside shipyard towns of Greenock and Clydebank, destroying entire housing estates. A famous photograph shows a mangled tram car still standing amidst the rubble of devastated tenements where hundreds of people had perished. Incendiary bombs set whole streets of Clyde-bank alight, and survivors of the Clydebank Blitz recall being strafed in the roadway as sparks fell between the girders of half-built, roofless brick shelters. Isa Mackenzie, who was twelve at the time, recalled, “It was like being in a horror film.” Yet only a couple of years after this Clydeside atrocity, there occurred a far more welcome wartime incident which transformed the great cultural holdings of Glasgow, confirming it as a world-class city of art.
That moment came in 1943, when Sir William Burrell, a former local councillor and Clyde shipping magnate, decided with his wife that their superlative art collection should be bequeathed to Glasgow. The Burrell gift—which will be described in detail later in this chapter—was part of the larger-scale development of the modern west-coast city as an artistic centre. The man to whom Burrell communicated his decision was Tom Honeyman, the now-legendary director of Glasgow’s Art Galleries. Trained as a doctor at Glasgow University, Honeyman had taken evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. After a decade in medicine, he joined a local art dealership run by McNeill Reid, J. M. Whistler’s godson and a man whose art-dealer father had been painted by Vincent Van Gogh. One of Van Gogh’s portraits of his friend Alexander Reid now hangs at Kelvingrove; someone who knew both artist and sitter said they looked like twins: “They even dressed somewhat similarly, though I doubt if Vincent ever possessed anything like the Harris tweeds Reid usually wore.”
Honeyman loved Van Gogh’s vivid portrait of Reid, and later coined the term “Scottish Colourists”—now used to refer to the group of fine early twentieth-century Scottish painters who moved between Scotland and France, developing bright post-Impressionist palettes. Increasingly expert in contemporary painting, Honeyman worked hard to convert a sometimes skeptical Glasgow public. When an exhibition of modern Polish art was staged in Sauchiehall Street’s Annan Galleries in 1940, he warned “visitors unfamiliar with modern art” that they should not be “upset because they were seeing something different, something bizarre.”
Appointed director of Glasgow’s Art Galleries the previous year, this impressive arts administrator was well connected. To mark his appointment, local collector William McInnes presented the Art Galleries with Matisse’s Head of a Young Girl, for which McNeill Reid had paid £60 at auction. Five years later, encouraged by Honeyman, McInnes bequeathed his entire collection to Glasgow. It included works by Bonnard, Braque, Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, and Seurat. Some of McInnes’s paintings, such as Matisse’s luminous Pink Tablecloth and Van Gogh’s Blute-Fin Windmill, Montmartre, are still among the jewels of the Kelvingrove collection. Beyond these treasures, Honeyman added works which had been acquired by Glasgow industrialists with a taste for such painters as Corot and Courbet. He also bought paintings using the Art Galleries’ very modest purchasing fund: £150 for a fine Derain, £450 for an Utrillo.
If Honeyman’s talents and reputation led to Glasgow’s receiving the gift of the Burrell Collection, that might be seen as his greatest achievement. Yet he in no sense rested on his laurels. The culmination of his tenure as a museum director came in 1952, when he persuaded Glasgow Corporation to spend £8,200 buying Salvador Dalí’s Christ of St. John of the Cross. In this remarkable work, based on the Spanish mystic’s vision of seeing the crucified Christ hanging in midair, Christ is viewed from above as he hangs gazing down at the world. Specifically, he sees a boat by the Lake of Galilee. Though the “mad price” paid for this painting drew criticism, the picture has since become one of Glasgow’s most famous, worthy of discussion alongside its Rembrandts and its 500-year-old vision of The Adulteress Brought before Christ—once attributed to Giorgione but now regarded as painted by Titian. At Kelvingrove and in its other art museums, which include the Burrell Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow possesses the finest municipally owned art collection in Britain. If one exempts the galleries of capital cities, its picture hoard is among the best in the world.
In his 1971 autobiography, Art and Audacity, the enthusiastic Glaswegian patriot Honeyman asks his readers, “Did you know we are the best equipped city in the Commonwealth in the matter of public parks and open spaces?” and answers, “I know, nobody told you!” Visitors often assume that Glasgow, with its industrial past and postindustrial present, will lack greenery, but the opposite is true of the “dear green place.” In Bellahouston Park, in 1938, King George VI and Queen Mary opened an exhibition “to illustrate the progress of the British Empire at home and overseas”; it attracted more than twelve million people. Nowadays, many decades after it closed, what remains is the expansive verdant space, on part of which, in 1996, a version of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s elegant, white-walled “House for an Art Lover” was built from the architect’s unrealized plans. Parks and art go together in Glasgow. In the city’s west end, Kelvingrove Park is only one of the large green urban havens, but surely among the best. Walking past its statuary, one can glance up towards the fine Victorian terrace of Park Circus, which looks more than a little Parisian if the sun shines; beyond lie the shining towers of the 1856 Free Church College, now cleansed of their industrial grime and converted into apartments.
To stroll through Kelvingrove Park is to sense impressive landmarks all around, but it is also to glimpse, through the trees, sculptures of the great and good once connected with the city. Up on the hill near Park Circus, astride a restless horse, is the helmeted, Indian-born imperialist Field Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Waterford. Below this bronze equestrian statue, an inscription on the elaborate granite pedestal quotes from Roberts’s speech in Glasgow on May 6, 1913: “I seem to see the gleam in the near distance of the weapons and accoutrements of this Army of the future, this Citizen Army, the warder of these islands, and the pledge of the peace and of the continued greatness of this Empire.” World War I broke out sixteen months later, and Roberts died in 1914 on a visit to British troops in France. On one side of the base of his statue is a relief carving depicting kilted troops marching in pith helmets.
Across the park, the Scottish Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle, modelled in roughly hewn grey granite and more than ten feet tall, looks as if he is adjusting a malfunctioning hearing aid. On plinths just the other side of the tree-lined avenue called the Kelvin Way, Lord Kelvin and his academic colleague Lord Lister (who pioneered antiseptic surgery while Lecturer in Surgery at Glasgow University around 1860) sit in long robes, their bronze backs turned to the grassy slopes of Gilmorehill. Lister gazes out confidently, but Kelvin holds a pencil, his eyes intent on his notepad; in wet or foggy weather, a drip often hangs from his nose. With its walkways beside the river, and its paths between lawns extending towards Charing Cross, Kelvingrove Park is a memorial to Glasgow’s intellectual and artistic greatness. It is also a fine place to wander on a sunny day. Close to the statues of Kelvin and Lister is a more modern, semi-abstract bronze sculpture, The Psalmist, by Estonian-born Jewish sculptor Benno Schotz, the Glaswegian who had earlier repaired the Nazi-bombed statuary on the Kelvin Way. The Psalmist stands in a small memorial garden commemorating Tom Honeyman and his wife; this tranquil space was created by, among others, the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum Association and the Glasgow Tree Lovers Society.
Many of those who amble through Kelvingrove Park and along the Kelvin Way towards the Kelvin Hall sports arena are students at the city’s oldest academic institution, the University of Glasgow. Now situated in the west end on Gilmorehill, the university stood for most of its first four centuries on its city-centre site on the High Street which linked the Mercat Cross to the Cathedral. Founded in 1451 by papal decree, it is Scotland’s second-oldest academic institution (after St. Andrews). It first held classes in the Cathedral, then shifted to Rottenrow (Rat Row), until in 1460 James, Lord Hamilton, granted to the university its substantial High Street premises. Originally, it was a centre for theological training and served a town of perhaps 2,000 people. As late as the 1600s, with their 100–150 students, the academic buildings resembled in size and appearance a small Oxford or Cambridge college. A high tower presided over two quadrangles and several small internal gardens; the nearby Blackfriars Church lay across a garden wall. After the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, Andrew Melville had taken charge of Glasgow’s university and encouraged its lecturers, or “regents,” to specialize more. Melville’s nephew wrote, with a certain local rhetorical flourish, that there was “na place in Europe comparable to Glasgow for guid letters, during these years, for a plentifull and guid chepe mercat of all kind of langages, artes and sciences.”
That sense of the university as a “mercat” (market) hints at something which became clearer a century or so later: the developing relationship between academia and Glasgow’s merchants. In 1730, when Francis Hutcheson was appointed professor of moral philosophy, he was one of the first of a new breed of professors who lectured in English, rather than in the traditional Latin. Hutcheson discoursed on beauty, virtue, the passions, and the moral sense, but was aware, too, of finance: “How powerfully might the Example of a wisely generous Father, at once teach his Offspring the true Value of Wealth or Power, and prevent their Neglect of them, or foolish throwing them away, and yet inspire them with a generous Temper, capable of the just Use of them!”
Hutcheson’s student Adam Smith came to the University of Glasgow as a fourteen-year-old in 1737, returning as a professor in 1751, when his first specialist classes were on rhetoric and belles lettres. This made Smith the first university instructor in the English-speaking world to teach English literary texts: he pioneered the subject we now call “English lit.” Yet, like his mentor Hutcheson, who heralded the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith was alert to financial wealth. Even his literary lectures show economic awareness, arguing, “’Tis the Introduction of Commerce or at least of opulence which is commonly the attendent of Commerce which first brings on the improvement of Prose.” Teaching in a city where tobacco lords and other merchants helped to support printing, Smith in his early university literature classes theorized: “Where the Inhabitants of a city are rich and opulent, where they enjoy the necessaries and conveniences of life in ease and Security, there the arts will be cultivated and refinement of manners a neverfailing attendent.” In Smith’s day, the university printers, brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis, produced Latin, Greek, and English editions that were regarded as models of their kind. Now these volumes are eagerly collected.
Smith’s economic theory developed from his early literary and philosophical lectures. So did his emphasis on the importance of a society bound together by mutual sympathy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments—published in 1759, while he was teaching at Glasgow—he championed the kinds of social cohesion and mutual sympathetic awareness that counterbalanced the alienating effects of an increasingly industrial society. If some of his thoughts in that book were attuned to the world of Glasgow merchants with whom he mixed, and several of whom he had taught, Smith also spoke out against “sordid” slave masters and that system of which the tobacco lords were well aware: “Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those [African] nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they came from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.” Smith’s economic attitude towards slavery in The Wealth of Nations (1776) can seem less outspoken; but unlike his Edinburgh philosopher friend David Hume, he was prepared to denounce this stain on contemporary “Commerce.”
Selective quotation has tended to reduce Glasgow’s most famous professor to the narrow modern category of “economist.” Yet the subjects on which he lectured and wrote, ranging from classical and modern literature to philosophy and the “invisible hand” of competition in economic activity, show that he was interested generally in systems of circulation—linguistic, ideological, and commercial—rather than in any one specific modern discipline. For all that this theorist of the distribution of labour was born in Kirk-caldy on Scotland’s east coast and spent a good deal of time in Edinburgh, it was at Glasgow that Smith was student, teacher, and, eventually, university rector. At Glasgow, the most famous student he taught was James Boswell, the future biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell studied rhetoric and belles lettres with Smith, and was proud to have done so. But whereas Edinburgh boasts Alexander Stoddart’s imposing twenty-first-century bronze of Smith at the heart of the Royal Mile, Glasgow’s only statue of Smith (carved in marble in the 1860s by Germany’s Hans Gasser) is tucked away indoors where few people see it, at the university on Gilmorehill. This academic location may be fitting, but it also suggests that the west-coast city, with its impressive mercantile heritage, has not recognized fully the stellar importance of its best-known public intellectual.
By the nineteenth century, the area around the old University of Glasgow in the High Street was growing increasingly disreputable. Erasmus Darwin visited while he was an Edinburgh student, and wrote from Glasgow to his more famous brother Charles on March 9, 1826, that “the Students here actually play at foot ball within the precincts of the college: you never did see such a set since you was born & please God never again.” He did, though, find the Hunterian Museum (endowed in 1783 by Glasgow alumnus William Hunter, a great London surgeon) “well worth going to”; its collections, which have grown considerably, remain at the heart of the oldest of today’s three Glaswegian universities. While Strathclyde University and its more recent neighbor Glasgow Caledonian University remain city-centre establishments, the University of Glasgow is now the most important institution in the city’s west end.
The move to Gilmorehill in 1870 separated the academics from the Cathedral, which had nurtured them, but it provided a superb new location. The modern University of Glasgow has turned its back on the street called University Avenue, and faces instead the River Kelvin beyond. Originally designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the English architect of London’s St. Pancras Hotel, the magnificent Victorian Gothic main building took decades to complete. One of the city’s noblest landmarks, its lofty, spire-topped tower on its hilltop setting makes this structure all the more imposing when viewed from the riverbank and parklands below. While it looks splendid from the front, most students entering the old buildings do so from University Avenue, and have to climb stairs less salubriously positioned (beside the old toilets) before they ascend to the fine, broad lawns of the East and West Quadrangles.
48. The Victorian Gothic main building of Glasgow University, on Gilmorehill, towers above Kelvingrove Park. Arguably the city’s most splendid landmark, it was designed by George Gilbert Scott.
Not completed until the 1920s, the West Quad is where Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), Glasgow’s best-loved modern poet, had his first-floor office in what used to be the Department of English Literature. Morgan’s nimble, ambitious poems celebrate metamorphic energies, not least those of his city; his best book is titled From Glasgow to Saturn, and his memorial service—a national event—was held in the university’s Bute Hall, where Morgan’s friend and collaborator the saxophonist Tommy Smith enriched the obsequies with a long, heartfelt wolf-howl. In the 1970s, Morgan was joined for a time on Gilmorehill by the much more bohemian artist and novelist Alasdair Gray (born in 1934), who lives nearby and who was employed then as the university’s writer-in-residence. Morgan’s office was calm, ordered, meticulously tidy; Gray’s the reverse. A distinguished alumnus remembers that, as a young man, he entered Gray’s West Quadrangle room to find the artist attentively depicting a mature female model who sat naked in front of his desk.
Even in the liberated 1960s and 1970s, Scotland’s universities did little to encourage nudity; but they have long championed a tolerant sense of humanity. Also in the West Quad is the dark-paneled Humanity Classroom (Latin was called “Humanity” at the oldest Scottish universities), which has been preserved as a traditional lecture hall. In this room, until at least the 1980s, classics students would be asked oral examination questions about the ancient world while they perched on the hefty, historic, and high-backed Blackstone chair, with sand sifting through an hourglass above their heads as they racked their brains for answers. When the Humanity Classroom is unlocked, visitors can still sit on its hard, semicircular wooden bench-seats which accommodated generations of Glasgow students, who sometimes sang to or jeered at their professors, but more often solemnly took notes.
Outside, between the East and West Quadrangles, are the splendid, neoGothic cloisters that lead to the university’s imposing graduation halls upstairs. Like the City Chambers in George Square, but more nobly, the Gilmorehill building speaks of Glasgow’s imperial past. In New Zealand’s South Island, it has been imitated by the designers of Otago University, while a stone tablet in the Glasgow cloisters pays tribute to “James McGill, 1744–1813, Student in Arts of the University of Glasgow, Trader, Soldier and Statesman in Canada and Founder of McGill University, Montreal.”
Visitors to Gilmorehill are likely to enjoy the Hunterian Museum, entered by a sweeping staircase above the cloisters. This museum’s rich and varied holdings include a collection of scientific instruments invented by or belonging to the university’s most famous nineteenth-century scientist, Glasgow Irishman William Thomson. Better known as Lord Kelvin, this researcher—after whom the “kelvin,” a unit for measuring heat, is named—grew up in the old college on the High Street where his father was mathematics professor. William matriculated as a student there in 1834, at the age of ten. The following year he and his brother made an “electrical machine” which, their sister Anna recorded, “gives strong shocks.” After studies at Glasgow and Cambridge (where a street is now named after him and where his work on electricity inspired the great Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell), Thomson was appointed to the Glasgow Chair of Natural Philosophy, as physics was then called, in 1846. He was twenty-two. Investigating heat and electricity, he continued to make machines, turning down the offer of a chair in Cambridge because, as he put it, “the convenience of Glasgow for getting mechanical work done” allowed “means of action which I could not have in any other place.”
Thomson thrived in one of the great capitals of Victorian industry. In 1851, he was the first person to enunciate what became the second law of thermodynamics: “It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.” His emphasis on the inevitable “dissipation of mechanical energy” has a Calvinistic accent, but he also believed in energy’s “transformation,” and became a leader in a group of Scottish physicists who developed the far-reaching “science of energy.” In Glasgow’s old college, Thomson set up Britain’s first university physical laboratory. At Gilmorehill he had a new, purpose-built lab. Knighted for his work on submarine telegraphy, which used his instruments, he experimented with all kinds of science, from acoustics to hydroelectric power, and is credited with seventy patents.
A professor who lived in some style (he owned a large yacht, for sailing on the Clyde), Kelvin was an entertaining teacher. Known to fire a rifle for demonstration purposes during his Gilmorehill lectures on acoustics, he also played to students on a French horn, a cornet, and an African thumb piano. His “elephant gun” and several musical instruments survive in the Glasgow University collections, as do many of his laboratory instruments and strikingly sculpted scientific models in wood, wire, and other materials. Kelvin is said to have glued and wired these together during vacations; as he told a lecture audience at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1884, “I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing.” From a wooden model of quartz crystals to beads glued in the form of a three-dimensional soap bubble, Kelvin’s Glasgow improvisations were appropriate to a city obsessed with mechanical construction. His house, Number 11 in the elegant Professors’ Square on Gilmorehill, can still be seen; thanks to him, it was the world’s first home to be lit entirely by carbon filament lamps. He had wired it, he told his friend Prime Minister Gladstone, “from attic to cellar.” His electrical wires, also used in his laboratory, are among Glasgow University’s quirkier museum pieces.
Kelvin would still recognize his house, but no professors now live in Professors’ Square. A few still resided there in the 1970s, their Victorian homes splendidly cluttered, odd shoes jammed among books in the bookcases. Today, much of the Gilbert Scott main building of the university is given over to a swarm of administrators. A plethora of other structures fills the campus. Built in the later twentieth century, the pale, soaring University Library is the largest of its kind in Scotland, its treasures running from a ninth-century medical text, the earliest substantial Western manuscript in the nation, to the scrapbooks of Edwin Morgan. Next to it, the Hunterian Art Gallery includes re-created Charles Rennie Mackintosh domestic interiors and a painting collection with fine Chardins and Scottish Colourists. Perhaps more surprisingly, the Hunterian also displays one of the world’s best exhibitions of the works of the Scottish-descended American artist James McNeill Whistler, godfather to Glasgow art dealer McNeill Reid.
If you walk westwards down University Avenue, in the opposite direction from the Kelvin Way, you pass the glass-fronted twenty-first-century Wolfson Medical Building and come to the intersection with Byres Road, once an area of cattle farming and today a breezy centre of west end life. A stalwart presence since the 1840s, when people played curling on a nearby pond, the historic Curlers Tavern (now called Curlers Rest), with its two-storey frontage adorned with carriage lamps, is but one of many Byres Road pubs and restaurants frequented by local residents and students alike. Since a high percentage of Glasgow’s university students originate from the city and areas nearby, it is not unusual to be both a local resident and a student. Byres Road is arty, a little bohemian—an attractive mélange of traditional tenements and busy shops. In Ashton Lane, which leads off it, Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark is set partly in Glasgow and partly in a strangely imagined terrain, painted murals in a wittily named upscale restaurant, the Ubiquitous Chip, which is celebrated for, among other things, its vegetarian haggis. Founded in nearby Ruthven Street in 1971 by Ronnie Clydesdale, “the Chip” moved to Ashton Lane eight years later; its diners have ranged from Glasgow writers and anti-apartheid campaigners to Mick Jagger, Princess Margaret, and Kylie Minogue—though not all at the same table. More of Alasdair Gray’s distinctive wall paintings can be seen on the walls, stairways, floors, and high ceilings of the former church at the northeast corner of Byres Road, where that street intersects with Great Western Road. Now styled Oran Mor (Gaelic for “the Great Music”), this ex-kirk is a popular arts venue, its restaurant and bar noisily crowded at night.
Considerably more tranquil, entered from the corner of Great Western Road diagonally opposite Oran Mor, Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens are a favourite of parents with toddlers, as well as a haunt of magpies, pigeons, and grey squirrels. Running parallel to part of Great Western Road and confronting handsome terraces of housing built for the Victorian bourgeoisie, the Botanic Gardens today extend across twenty hectares bordering the River Kelvin. They have occupied some of this site since the 1840s, but their origins lie in a different, much smaller location: the old, city-centre University Physic Garden, which once lay behind the High Street. James Sutherland, who looked after the Edinburgh equivalent, assisted in its creation in 1706 “for the ornament of the College and for the students improvement in the skill of Bottany.” Throughout their history, the gardens have been a sensitive guide to Glasgow’s air quality. Their modern historian, Eric W. Curtis, quotes Professor William Cullen and a colleague pointing out in 1754 that the plants are “very much exposed to the smoke and soot of the Town”; the establishment of a type foundry next door did not help, since it defiled the atmosphere through its use of lead, antimony, tin, and copper. By the early nineteenth century, the city-centre Physic Garden’s ground was “very barren.” In 1813, when Thomas Hopkirk, Fellow of the Linnean Society, published his pioneering Flora Glottiana: A Catalogue of Indigenous Plants on the Banks of the River Clyde, and in the Neighbourhood of the City of Glasgow with local bookseller John Smith & Son, he drew his examples from what were then neighbouring rural places such as Tollcross and wooded Cambuslang, not from the city itself, with its struggling, polluted Physic Garden.
A plaque on a back wall at the east end of Fitzroy Place, on Sauchiehall Street, marks the spot where Glasgow’s second Botanic Garden was instituted by Hopkirk and others at “Sandyford” in 1817. Christian Glassford, daughter of the tobacco lord John Glassford, was Hopkirk’s mother. His uncle, Henry Glassford, was a founder of the new Botanic Gardens. This kinship network is further indication of the close-knit nature of Glasgow’s historic merchant elite, linking local commerce and intellectual life. Through the broad gates of the gardens at Sandyford, merchants brought plants imported from America and the Caribbean. As well as advocating a new “Merchants’ Park” (later the Necropolis), Hopkirk published an illustration of his “Royal Botanic Garden” in the 1825 Glasgow Looking Glass. Depicting well-dressed men, women, and children promenading in front of substantial glasshouses, the picture is captioned, “This fashionable place of resort has this season been more numerously attended than ever. We observe that additional grass walks have been added to the Promenade ground, and the excellent Trumpet Band of the 5th Dragoons, we believe, will be in attendance on Saturday next. The splendid Cactus Seciosissimus which has been in flower for some time past has given increased interest to the Houses.—Vide et crede.”
That Latin flourish (“See and believe”) hints at the bon ton Hopkirk wished to establish, but his gardens were also scientifically important. In the early 1820s, young David Douglas (after whom the Douglas fir is named) worked there as a gardener, attending lectures by the University of Glasgow’s professor of botany, William Jackson Hooker. The professor took Douglas on several plant-collecting field trips to the Highlands, recognizing his great potential as a field naturalist. In 1823, Douglas set out on travels that would take him as far as Vancouver, California, and even Hawaii, where he was gored to death by a wild bull in 1833.
During his short life, Douglas sent back numerous specimens of plants to Britain’s botanic gardens, including those of Glasgow. Yet in 1838, two years before Hooker moved to become head of the great Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a Glaswegian committee was again concerned about the effects of pollution, which “renders the air less pure for many plants.” At first, many kinds of pine trees had been grown at Sandyford. “Now throughout the Garden there is not a single healthy pine of any species.” When the garden had been laid out, there had been hardly any houses west of Buchanan Street; thirty years later “almost a third of the city [was] west of that line,” sending up smoke from a vast array of chimneys. A revealing barometer of Glasgow’s air quality, the gardens fled farther west.
In 1840, when they moved to their current site, the city was planning a long new thoroughfare, still one of its most impressive streets. Great Western Road—where, opposite the Botanic Gardens, passersby can admire the monumental Grosvenor Terrace (designed by John Thomas Rochead in 1855) and the spectacular tenements of Great Western Terrace (designed by Alexander “Greek” Thomson in 1869)—might channel elegant promenaders to the lawns and glasshouses. City planners also hoped that the greenery of the Kelvin would provide a sustaining habitat. Laid out by Thomas Hopkirk’s own household gardener, Stewart Murray, on part of a drumlin (a gently sloping mound of materials left behind in prehistory by a melting glacier), the new Royal Botanic Garden was to be “a powerful instrument” for the “moral improvement” of “well informed but poorer . . . artisans.” Though there was normally a charge for admission (which funded the Garden and kept out riffraff), one week each summer the site was opened gratis. As many as 34,000 people visited in a single day, eager to see such curious exotica as the banana—“resembling a short cucumber.” Plant donors soon included David Livingstone, the famous missionary and African explorer, who was born in nearby Blantyre in Lanarkshire and who had studied at Anderson’s College on George Square. There he had met his close friend “Paraffin Young,” inventor of the important industrial process of distilling oil from shale. As the Empire and the Victorian flower gardens grew, so did the industries which polluted them.
Glasshouses offered some protection. In 1871 the finest of these, the Kibble Crystal Art Palace, was erected thanks to the entrepreneurship of wealthy John Kibble, who had this palatial structure transported from the garden of his West of Scotland seaside mansion. Inside his vast glass pleasure dome, among palms and orchids, Victorian Glasgow certainly flourished. Gladstone, while he was rector of the University of Glasgow, once orated at the Kibble Palace for ninety nonstop minutes; on another occasion, massed singers performed “Rule, Britannia” (as well as “Rhine Wine” and the Scots song “Tullochgorum”) when Gladstone’s political rival Benjamin Disraeli was installed as rector.
Then, as now, the glasshouse was a treasured public space festooned not just with plants, but also with white marble statues. Quick, tactful thinking ensured that “the naked graces of Apollo” were clothed in “a decorous covering of calico” when American evangelists Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey preached there in 1874. Today its walkways are graced by several biblical sculptures—Cain, Eve, the Sisters of Bethany—often bewitchingly nude. Nothing is stranger in a Glasgow winter than to step into the glasshouse, among dripping soursop trees from Central America; under the high glazed dome of the Kibble Palace soar Natal wild banana trees from South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Above your head a Southeast Australian Golden Mimosa blossoms bright yellow in the Scottish January, and damp ferns brush your hair close to the marble Victorian erotica of a turbaned, yet curiously European-looking bare-breasted Nubian slave girl.
When the Kibble Palace was restored—magnificently—in 2006, investigators discovered that it had been designed to contain, beneath its large, well-stocked fish pond, a substantial chamber in which cunningly concealed musicians might perform. Today, as attendants pass with trolleys of silver teapots for conference delegates, or as a jazz concert wafts its improvisations through the palms, visitors can enjoy a fine display of plants in this structure, whose gorgeousnesses, including its central dome 146 feet in diameter, demonstrate why the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1889 described Glasgow as “about the most pushing and prosperous community in the kingdom.” Though the city expanded to envelop nearby green spaces and though it continued to fight a running battle with pollution, neither the old “blow-hole” of a subterranean railway at the now-demolished Botanic Gardens Station, nor even a freakish 1968 hurricane, has prevented this oasis, today free and owned by the city, from remaining a steamy glory of Glasgow.
49. Erected in 1871 thanks to the generosity of John Kibble, the Kibble Palace is the architectural centrepiece of Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens. Inside, the palace’s nude statues were clothed in “a decorous covering of calico” when American evangelists Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey preached there in 1874.
Curbing the use of coal fires, the 1956 Clean Air Act brought new and renewed possibilities. Twenty-first-century visitors can see, in a separate area beyond Kirklee Road, the outdoor David Douglas Collection of plants (such as the ponderosa pine and the poached-egg plant, Limnanthes douglasii) introduced to Europe by Glasgow’s most famous gardener. In summer you can sit outdoors in the Gardens’ green, cultured calm. Over in the Rose Garden a recently installed black, Mackintosh-style bench memorializes Neil Reid Baird, “Musician and Violin Maker,” while another seat near the glasshouse invites passersby to “sit awhile and consider life’s simple pleasures.”
Few, though, associate this relaxed space with the city’s most notorious Victorian murder. The Curator’s House in the Botanic Gardens, an Italianate structure designed in 1840 by Charles Wilson before he became architect of such grand Glasgow terraces as Park Circus, was for a time the lodging of Jersey-born Pierre Emile L’Angelier. In 1855, when he was in his early thirties, L’Angelier—a lover of botany—presented a flower to the nineteen-year-old eldest daughter of the wealthy James Smith, a Glasgow architect whose designs for the McLellan Galleries were then being translated into stone in Sauchiehall Street. L’Angelier’s inamorata, Madeleine, had long dark hair, large dark eyes, and a “clear, sweet treble” voice. She wrote to him saying that his flower was fading, and added: “I wish I understood botany, for your sake, as I might send you some specimens of moss. But, alas! I know nothing of that study.” No botanist, but generally well educated, this imaginative young woman quoted a verse from Solitary Hours, by the spirited, melancholy poet Caroline Bowles:
I never cast a flower away,
The gift of one who cared for me,
A little flower, a faded flower,
But it was done reluctantly.
Madeleine Smith’s father disapproved of his daughter’s friendship with the Bothwell Street office clerk Emile. More than once, their exchange of letters was broken off. In his Botanic Garden lodgings, Emile discussed the relationship with Mrs. Sharp, the curator’s wife, who was aware that her lodger enjoyed a clandestine correspondence with a girl called Madeleine, or “Mimi,” whom he was “in the way of meeting.” Mrs. Sharp thought that Emile, a regular churchgoer, was “very steady and temperate.” She kept in touch with him when he moved into other lodgings farther down Great Western Road.
Madeleine had known Emile since she was sixteen. They never married, but by late 1855 she was addressing him as “My dear darling husband.” In one letter, she rejoiced in “being fondled by you” and signed herself “Mimi L’Angelier.” Writing of “an hour of bliss” and of how “if we did wrong last night, it was in the excitement of our love,” Madeleine delighted in their covert liaison. Interrogating her about her menstrual cycle, Emile worried that she might not have been a virgin when they first slept together. In July 1856, she wrote to him from a country house where he continued to visit her secretly: “I did laugh at your pinning my little flower to your shirt. I always put your flowers into books, in the drawing-room, there I can go and look at them at any time. Do not weep, darling, fond husband, it makes me sad to think you weep. Do not do it, darling; a fond embrace and dear kiss to you, sweet and much beloved Emile. Our intimacy has not been criminal, as I am your wife before God—so it has been no sin our loving each other. No; darling, fond Emile, I am your wife.”
The affair of Madeleine and Emile belongs to the era of Tennyson’s poem “The Princess,” with all its heady botanic eroticism,
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
With references to “the gardens,” to Buchanan Street, and to Sauchiehall Street, this couple’s letters are revealing of Glaswegian middle-class life. The well-off Smith family had their country home at Rhu, near Helensburgh, farther down the Clyde; in the city, they lived for a time on a corner of Blythswood Square, at Number 7, whose handsome elevated front door still beckons between stone pillars at the top of a flight of eight steps. Madeleine and her sister shared a basement bedroom fronting on Blythswood Street. The lovers’ correspondence is intensely passionate, its overemphatic endearments hinting at uncertainty and frustrated longing. “My night dress was on when you saw me,” writes Madeleine to Emile, who has glimpsed her when he slipped notes in white envelopes through her window; “would to God you had been in the same attire.” Yet only a month later, in February 1857, one of Madeleine’s letters is returned to her, and she maintains, “My love for you has ceased.” She begs her lover, “For God’s sake do not bring your once loved Mimi to an open shame . . . Emile, do not drive me to death . . . Emile, for god’s sake do not send my letters to papa; it will be an open rupture. I will leave the house. I will die. . . . I am mad. I am ill. . . . [Papa] will hate me as a guilty wretch. . . . I put on paper what I should not . . . Do not inform on me—do not make me a public shame. . . . I shall be ruined.”
50. The Smith family home on the corner at 7 Blythswood Square remains a handsome Glasgow building. Madeleine Smith and her sister are said to have slept in a basement bedroom.
A few months later, Emile was found dead. Medical examinations (including one conducted by Edinburgh forensic surgeon Robert Christison) revealed that he had been poisoned with arsenic. Now engaged to another man, Madeleine had several times purchased that toxin. Arrested, she confessed that she had bought the poison; popular papers such as Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal had advised that if she diluted it and applied it to her skin, it would improve her complexion. Sent for trial to Edinburgh, the twenty-two-year-old was led from the cells, emerging through a trapdoor into the Scottish capital’s High Court. She stood in the dock impassively, hearing her love letters, “written . . . in the most licentious terms,” read aloud to a crowded courtroom. There she was accused of a “criminal intimacy” and of living in the “depth of degradation.” She was also charged with murder. After a nine-day trial, the all-male jury found her not guilty of one charge of poisoning with intent to kill, and, resorting to a useful Scottish verdict, declared two other similar charges “not proven.” The Scotsman reported that when the verdicts were announced, “cheering came from the audience, especially from the galleries.” Madeleine’s “head slightly fell, and her face broke into a bright but somewhat agitated smile.”
This courtroom drama was a media sensation. Putting a young Glaswegian on trial in Edinburgh, it brought together sex, poison, and betrayal. Soon booksellers had sold 10,000 copies of the best-selling Trial of Miss Madeleine H. Smith, before the High Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, June 30th to July 9th, 1857, for the Alleged Poisoning of M. Pierre Emile L’Angelier, at Glasgow. The book reprinted the love letters from court transcripts, along with the brilliant rhetoric of John Inglis, who (though in private he may have considered her guilty) quoted Shakespeare in his courtroom defence of Madeleine, suggesting that her volatile lover might have committed suicide. Edinburgh papers relished the spectacle of this Glasgow crime. Whereas the Scotsman described the accused simply as “lady-like” and commented on her expression of “extraordinary nerve,” to the Glasgow Herald she was “very pretty.” The Herald’s reporter detailed fully her “white straw bonnet, black silk mantle, grey cloak, brown silk gown, lavender gloves, and . . . silver-mounted smelling-bottle in her hand.”
To some, Madeleine was a femme fatale. Her “not proven” case was pored over by Victorian Britain because it was a puzzle in which the truth, as the Times of London put it, “is for ever destined to be hidden.” Yet it also fascinated because of the erotic passion revealed. Jane Welsh Carlyle thought Smith “a little incarnate devil”; more coldly subtle, George Eliot damned her as “one of the least fascinating of murderesses”; Nathaniel Hawthorne, touring the Scottish Highlands, observed newspaper reports being read aloud in hotels to groups of excited travellers. Twenty-first-century readers may be struck by the patriarchal rhetoric surrounding the case; also by what it reveals about male repression of and curiosity about female sexual pleasure. Summing up at Smith’s trial in Edinburgh, the judge said to the jury’s “gentlemen” with regard to Madeleine’s supposed aim of poisoning her lover, “I don’t think you will consider it so unlikely as was supposed that this girl, after writing such letters, may have been capable of cherishing such a purpose.” The trial was not just about murder; it was also about the politics of gender. This was sensed by Dorothy L. Sayers, who drew on it for her classic 1930 crime novel Strong Poison; and by David Lean in his stylish 1949 movie, Madeleine. More recently, and transposed to the later nineteenth-century era of the Glasgow Boys, aspects of Madeleine Smith’s case underpin Jane Harris’s engrossing 2011 novel Gillespie and I.
When the trial was ended, the Scotsman recorded, a body double left the court in a cab, staging a faint in front of “the eager gaze of the mob.” The real “Miss Smith,” meanwhile, in “straw bonnet, dark ribbons, and green veil,” travelled home “to her father’s house.” Four years afterwards, in the south of England, she married an artist named Wardle who worked for William Morris and was friendly with Pre-Raphaelite painters. As Lena Wardle, she had two children and acted as treasurer and librarian to the Bloomsbury branch of the Socialist League. Later, after separating from her husband, Lena went to America and found a new partner, an Irish New Yorker named William Sheehy. Madeleine Smith had reinvented herself, but the mystery she had been part of did not go away. Henry James, who had read about her when he was fourteen, later wrote with darkly ironic insight, “She precisely didn’t squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity.” Far from Glasgow’s Blythswood Square and Botanic Gardens, she and her American lover lived for a time on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. When Lena Wardle Sheehy died in the Bronx in 1928, she was buried, like Frederick Douglass and several of the children of Buffalo Bill, among the beautiful flowerbeds and blossoming trees of Mount Hope Cemetery, in New York.
The Madeleine Smith trial took place as Glasgow was approaching its architectural zenith. Two of Madeleine’s male relations, architects both, had designed some of the buildings in Royal Exchange Square off Buchanan Street. Her father was the architect behind the asymmetrical Græco-Roman front of the old Victoria Baths at 106–108 West Nile Street, in the city’s burgeoning commercial district. All through Madeleine’s lifetime, the ancient empires of Greece and Rome were being plundered as architectural models for the rapidly expanding imperial city of Glasgow. Yet whereas in Edinburgh’s New Town planning, chaste classicism ruled, in a Glasgow made rich through shipbuilding, locomotive construction, iron- and steelmaking, and heavy industry, there was delight in adventurously polymorphous variety. Architecture in the second city of the Empire at its most spectacular looked to other empires, too—those of the pharaohs’ Egypt, Hindu India, even ancient Assyria. As an architectural style, classicism could certainly be followed, but also remixed, riffed on asymmetrically, hybridized, and reinvented for ambitious West of Scotland capitalists awash with old and new cash.
Still, there were convincing attempts at “standard” classicism. Blythswood Square, where Madeleine was alleged to have poisoned Emile by handing him cups of arsenic-laced cocoa from her basement bedroom window, was part of the larger Blythswood New Town development laid out in the 1820s half a mile or so west of George Square. Emile’s office in Bothwell Street was also housed in this grid-planned expansion, seemingly North American in its regularity of urban blocks, even if much disrupted by later building. While Madeleine and Emile were lovers, construction was under way at the iron-framed Gardner’s Warehouse in Jamaica Street; appearing almost entirely made up of windows, this structure drew on the style of Renaissance Venice. During the year of Madeleine’s trial, the original bank building at 8 Gordon Street, said to be modeled on Rome’s Farnese Palace, was completed. On its exterior are panels and pediments ostentatiously depicting children printing money, Commerce supported by Navigation and Locomotion, Glasgow linked to Trade and Manufacture, and—broadmindedly, if last and least—Edinburgh linked with Science and Art. This was the work of an Edinburgh architect.
Gordon Street is a good place to get a sense of Victorian commercial Glasgow. On its south side stand the cast-iron columns of the palazzo-like Ca’ d’Oro Building, designed in 1872 as a furniture warehouse and substantially restored after a 1987 fire. Rail travellers emerge from the hearty concourse of Central Station, with its steely silver World War I shell just inside the front portals, to see opposite, on the north side of Gordon Street, an imposing, high, column-fronted stone building capped with twin domes. The domes and top storeys are Edwardian additions; the first four storeys are the work of Glasgow’s most stunningly eclectic mid-Victorian architect, Alexander Thomson. For visitors, there can be no more appropriate welcome to this lapsed imperial polis.
Most people, including many modern Glaswegians, are not sure what to make of Alexander Thomson. Perhaps one way to comprehend him is to recall Thomas De Quincey’s 1846 description of Glasgow:
So vast a city, having more than three hundred thousand inhabitants . . . nearly all children of toil; and a city, too, which, from the necessities of its circumstances, draws so deeply upon that fountain of misery and guilt which some ordinance, as ancient as “our father Jacob,” with his patriarchal well for Samaria, has bequeathed to manufacturing towns,—to Ninevehs, to Babylons, to Tyres. How tarnished with eternal canopies of smoke, and of sorrow; how dark with agitations of many orders, is the mighty town.
Thomson was attracted to De Quincey’s words. At the end of his life, he used a quotation from the same essay to enhance the culmination of his 1874 lecture on Egyptian architecture: De Quincey’s description of an ancient Egyptian head of Memnon as exemplifying “sublimity” and provoking “the breathlessness which belongs to a saintly trance.” Thomson knew Glasgow thoroughly, and, like De Quincey, saw it biblically. In his writings on architecture, Thomson quotes Burns and Tennyson, Ruskin and De Quincey; but most of all he borrows the words of the Bible. An elder of the United Presbyterian Kirk (and probably a freemason), he loved the passage from the Book of Revelation where “John saw ‘the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven.’” In Glasgow, drawing particularly on Egyptian and Greek elements, and planning churches based on the Temple of Solomon, Alexander Thomson sought to build such a city.
An autodidact who had nineteen siblings and was orphaned at the age of thirteen, Thomson is the most ambitious architect Glasgow has ever produced. In 1868 he proposed replacing his city’s slums with a vast new, tenemental townscape whose streets would be roofed over with glass. He thought the “universe but a diagram of the mind of God”; the architect, with his own plans and diagrams, was co-creator: “A design is a Creation of the Imagination,” he stated, maintaining that the “Architect” operated “within the sphere of Poesy.” Having scrutinized Glasgow’s structures, admiring both long-lasting tenements and handsome Greek revival buildings, Thomson knew he dwelt in a remarkable time and place: “We live in a great city—our merchants are princes”; but he wished to fuse in new ways the architect’s æsthetic sense with available engineering and commercial hardheadedness. “The last thirty years have seen immense sums expended on engineering works, which must necessarily exist for generations to come. But, with very few exceptions, little artistic skill has been bestowed on them.”
In Glasgow, Thomson knew that new technologies could further artistic grandeur: “With our Derrick cranes and our steam-engines we could lift and set stones on our walls of three or four tons weight.” He knew, too, that imperial technologies of travel, printing, photography, and research afforded access to an international and transhistorical stylistic vocabulary. Architects now possessed
aids and facilities in the practice of their art which, in no former age, was ever dreamt of. They are built about with books, containing examples of every known style. If an architect wants an idea, he does not require to fly away into the region of imagination to fetch it—it is ready at hand on the adjoining shelf, and needs only to be reached down. Treatises upon everything connected with building are multiplied and piled up to an extent that defies perusal. Our builders, besides having access to all these mountains of knowledge, have mechanical aids unknown in the days of our fathers. For building materials, besides iron and brick, our neighbourhood abounds in stone, which for quality, variety, and abundance, is unequalled in the kingdom, and what have we made of it all?
Published in the Glasgow Herald on February 23, 1859, this call to arms, delivered at the Glasgow Architectural Society in the Thomson-designed Scottish Exhibition Rooms in Bath Street, has something of a manifesto quality. The buildings Thomson planned lived up to it, bringing to Glasgow’s streets a remarkable hybrid of biblical antiquity and ambitious modernity. At 84–100 Union Street, his monumental “Egyptian Halls”—with their Assyrian scroll capitals topping slim piers—exemplify his contention that “our modern engineers use girders to span spaces where formerly arches would have been resorted to, and that with an economy of means and stability of structure that puts the arch to shame.”
The Presbyterian Thomson hated arches. He associated them with the “Romish” (that is, Roman Catholic) architecture of the Victorian Gothicism championed by England’s great Catholic architect Augustus Pugin. Gilbert Scott’s commission to build the new University of Glasgow disgusted Thomson and made him jealous. What he loved were grand streetscapes that fused Greece, Egypt, and modern building technology into a tenemental sublime: “Our street ranges must ever continue to be built on horizontal principles, the Gothic must be regarded as a discordant feature in our vistas.” Gothic architecture showed a despicable “inveterate perpendicularity.” Horizontality, for Thomson, had a religious allure. Invoking the art of Turner and of the Edinburgh-born David Roberts, who painted architectural scenes from ancient Egypt, he hymned “the mysterious power of the horizontal element in carrying the mind away into space, and into speculations upon infinity.” Such rhetoric suggests that Thomson’s Moray Place (where the architect lived, at Number 1) or his lengthy and imposing Great Western Terrace—along with other extended tenement perspectives on Great Western Road—are not there just to provide housing for the well-off; they are there to inspire religious experience.
Thomson had a solemn view of his calling. If architecture was art, he maintained, “religion has been seen as the soul of art from the beginning.” Yet he kept, too, a sense of humour. In a lecture entitled “The Spirit of the Egyptian Style,” he quoted from poet Horace Smith’s “Address to the Mummy at Belzoni’s Exhibition,” published in Smith’s Gaieties and Gravities: the poem hails a being who has frequented Egypt’s “temples, palaces and piles stupendous, / Of which the very ruins are tremendous.” Thomson sought to bring the stupendous and tremendous glories of Thebes and Karnak not only to middle-class Glaswegians, but also to warehousemen and passersby. Whereas the opium addict De Quincey, who spent some time in the city trying to evade his Edinburgh creditors, saw Glasgow as biblically troubled, Alexander Thomson, familiar with the apocalyptic extravaganzas of Romantic painters like John Martin, sought to give it more than a dash of Old Testament epic splendour.
Thomson’s nickname was “Greek,” and he did love Greek architecture—but he prized Egypt just as much. Never leaving the British Isles, he voyaged far in the pages of books. He adored Glasgow, but, after the Victorian era, Glasgow did not always return his adoration. As twentieth-century planners turned against the tenement, preferring the verticality of tower blocks, several of his best buildings were lost. World War II bombs destroyed his Queen’s Park Church; fire ravaged his Caledonia Road Kirk. You can walk round the exterior of Thomson’s remarkable, daringly asymmetrical St. Vincent Street Free Church (built 1857–1859), a Solomonic temple-cum-acropolis topped with a surprising piece of verticality, part spire, part phallus, part minaret; and you can marvel at this building’s marvellously eclectic ornamentation, where Greek and Assyrian, Hindu and Egyptian consort together in a Glaswegian imperial sublime. Yet if you wish to inhabit fully Greek Thomson’s architectural imagination, the best place to go is his suburban villa at Holmwood in the suburb of Netherlee, a short walk from Muirend rail station.
With its long, slitted wall joining the citadel-like villa to a coach house, and its almost Assyrian gates, Holmwood (now owned by the National Trust for Scotland) is both alluring and forbidding. Set above a lawn in wooded grounds, the house looks like an asymmetrical assembly of small Greek temples. Pictured from the front in Thomson’s 1868 volume Villa and Cottage Architecture, it appears stern and military. One of the modern designers whose work seems to have influenced Thomson was the Prussian royal family’s unflinching architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Whether or not you like Holmwood, it is utterly remarkable, its horizontality fully built into the landscape, its gently pitched roofs (a Thomson signature) bearing at their eaves unusual, antenna-like adornments. At the top of the roof, and above the house’s main stair, is a cupola whose inside is supported by sculpted chimeræ and whose curved glass is etched with stars.
51. Holmwood House, designed by the great Victorian architect Alexander Thomson in the late 1850s, is one of the most striking examples of Glaswegian domestic architecture. Set in parklands, the building looks every inch a plutocrat’s palace.
At Holmwood, Thomson also designed the interiors and furniture. The dining room has a twenty-one-panel frieze showing scenes from Homer’s Iliad, a black marble fireplace decorated in gold, and magnificent high, carved doors of varnished American yellow pine ornamented with mahogany. Built for a local businessman, Holmwood is a plutocrat’s palace. Its parlour boasts almost floor-to-ceiling glass in a stunning bay window. Its upstairs drawing room has large, facing mirrors and a star-spangled ceiling, offering a mixture of illumination bordered by dark grandeur. Thomson disliked external gutters and drainpipes; at times, modern workmen have found it difficult to repair Holmwood’s leaking roof. Yet, now lovingly restored, this lavish villa houses some of the very few surviving examples of Thomson’s monument-like furniture. No house in Glasgow gives such a good impression of the city’s imperial sublimity. That splendour, like the well-heeled elegance of Edinburgh New Town, co-existed with horrific slums: this is an architecture of inequality. But Glaswegians were in thrall to their dreams of empire, and Alexander Thomson expressed those ambitions in stone.
If Thomson’s imaginings were enterprisingly hybrid, the aspirations of other prosperous Glaswegians were frequently more stolidly conventional. On Saturday, January 18, 1902, a Glasgow councillor who lived in Great Western Road sat among 270 diners in the now-defunct Windsor Hotel. They were gathered at a commemorative dinner for James Watt, hosted by the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. After toasting the British monarchy and “the Imperial Forces,” the assembled company heard speeches praising the greatness of Scottish shipbuilding and the engineering genius of Watt. In Edinburgh, the Scotsman’s reporting of some of the speeches, and of the diners’ perhaps tipsily enthusiastic responses, gives a good flavour of Edwardian Glasgow’s self-image:
Sir Digby Murray, in submitting the toast of ‘The City of Glasgow,’ said . . . Glasgow had often been spoken of as the third city of rank in the United Kingdom (Cries of ‘The Second’)—it had been long spoken of as the third—(laughter)—but, even supposing that were the case so far as many respects were concerned, in other respects, for instance, in her shipbuilding and engineering, she stood first, not only in the United Kingdom but also in the world. (Applause.)
Lord Provost Chisholm, in responding, said there remained now, and had remained for the last decade not the shadow of a doubt as to the position which Glasgow occupied in the enumeration of the cities of this country. (Laughter and applause.) . . . In the population of the city of Glasgow they stood second, distanced by London alone. (Applause) . . . Amongst the cities of the world there were few, if any, which stood out more clearly as ‘man-made’ than the city of Glasgow. (Laughter and applause). . . . Whether they referred to those great and gigantic works which the deepening and straightening and widening of the Clyde had rendered possible, those vast shipbuilding yards that lined the Clyde right down to the old Port-Glasgow; or whether they thought of the railway systems which had their termini in Glasgow, or that extraordinary series of local intercommunication by underground railways or subways, or the remarkable electric installation, the electric tramway system, or whether they thought of numerous other adaptations of engineering skill and science, they saw how much Glasgow owed, how wholly it had been built up by the labour and skill and genius of men. How largely also were the inhabitants of the city indebted to these large works, not merely for the means of subsistence, but for the training which was given to intelligent workmen. (Applause.)
Laughing and clapping his hands, the councillor from Great Western Road very much belonged to a city which had triumphed through industry and engineering. He knew, too, the terrible problems of Glasgow’s poor, some of whose substandard housing he was attempting to have cleared. Yet for all his keen sense of the lives of the disadvantaged, this man relished the pleasures of the rich. His own family were shipowners and shipbuilders. The following year, as a Glasgow bailie, he dined with the king and queen in the City Chambers. Not long afterwards, among palm trees, elaborate drapes, and floral displays, he listened while the Unionist prime minister A. J. Balfour orated in Glasgow’s St. Andrew’s Halls about the reorganization of the navy, the need to further develop the British Empire, the importance of the Union between Scotland and England, and the strength of “the Imperial Forces.”
The name of this Glaswegian councillor was William Burrell. Whereas in an earlier century tobacco lords had been at the heart of the city’s wealth, intermarrying and forming shifting alliances, now it was the turn of shipping magnates and captains of industry. Burrell’s dark-haired sister Mary married James Mitchell, who belonged to the Mitchells of the shipping firm Edminston and Mitchell. Photographed in 1895 wearing a long white dress and clasping a dark, hanging ribbon, Mary was being painted by “Glasgow Boy” John Lavery to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. Like several others in the city, the Burrells were a family whose money came from engineering and trade, but who were attracted increasingly by art. Won by capitalist cunning and labouring muscle, the industrial spoils of nineteenth-century Glasgow were often purged of their associations with slum life and industrial pollution by being laundered into high culture. The collection of industrious Glasgow coachbuilder Archibald McLellan had formed the original core of the city’s art museum. T. G. Arthur and Arthur Kay were partners in a Glasgow warehousing firm, but also Victorian and Edwardian purchasers of paintings by Courbet, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Goya, Manet, Degas, and Whistler. Burrell wished to join this collecting elite. He started buying pictures in his teens.
From his youth, he was a very shrewd speculator in shipping. In January 1902, around the time he sat as a moustachioed thirty-nine-year-old with short, slightly receding hair, listening with fellow shipbuilders and others to speakers toasting Glasgow and Empire, Burrell the businessman was described by a friend in a letter:
He sells his fleet when there is the periodical boom and then puts his money into 3 per c[ent] stock and lies back until things are absolutely in the gutter—soup kitchen times—everyone starving for a job. He then goes like a roaring lion. Orders a dozen large steamers in a week, gets them built at rock bottom prices, less than 1⁄2 what they’d have cost him last year. Then by the time they’re delivered to him things have begun to improve a little bit and there he is ready with a tip top fleet of brand new steamers and owing to the cheap rate he’s had them built at, ready to carry cheaper than anybody. Sounds like a game anyone could play at but none of them have the pluck to do it. They simply sit and look at him “making money like slate stones” as he expresses it.
By the middle of World War I, Burrell the speculator had sold his fleet. He began to devote himself almost wholly to amassing artworks. As a collector he had been encouraged not least by Van Gogh’s Glasgow dealer friend Alexander Reid, whom Burrell recalled as someone who “did more than any other man has ever done to introduce fine pictures to Scotland and to create a love of art.” Reid steered Burrell towards the Glasgow Boys and Whistler. Yet Burrell’s eclectic tastes ranged from drawings by Punch cartoonist Phil May to classic Chinese ceramics. He bought pieces from every historical period and from many civilizations—but only if he was sure he was getting a bargain.
By 1901, Burrell was the biggest individual lender of works to the Glasgow International Exhibition, on whose general organizing committee he also sat. The dining room in his home at 8 Great Western Terrace had all its walls covered floor-to-ceiling in medieval and Renaissance tapestries. Burrell liked to buy tapestries; he felt you got more for your money. His astuteness in choosing both artworks and the dealers to advise him meant that his collection grew almost unrivalled. To house it, he bought a castle in the Scottish Borders. Eventually moving there, he did not forget Glasgow. Having loaned work from his hoard to both Edinburgh’s National Gallery (on whose board he sat) and to the National Gallery in London, he donated about eighty paintings and drawings to Kelvingrove in 1925. It was a characteristically canny move. Two years later, he was knighted.
Several public galleries courted Burrell. From the early 1930s onwards, he began to suggest that he might seek a permanent home for his collection; but he was a hard man to deal with. As he aged, he grew increasingly parsimonious. In his castle, he carried a key to unlock the boxes that encased the light switches. This prevented others from squandering his electricity. Family members had to apply for the key. The master switch for the whole castle’s supply was installed in his bedroom, and he habitually turned it off at 10:00 P.M. When burglars were suspected of being near the castle, Sir William discharged both barrels of a shotgun from his bedroom window. A staunch Unionist and Imperialist, he complained that the British were “evidently intent on throwing away India as we have done Southern Ireland and Egypt.” When instructions came from Edinburgh that all the iron railings around his castle were to be confiscated without compensation and melted down as part of the war effort, he was furious. Now Edinburgh would never get his collection.
So imagine the glee in the West of Scotland the following year, when, after Sir William had sent a telegram to summon from Kelvingrove his friend Tom Honeyman in December 1943, it was announced that the Burrell Collection would be presented to the city of Glasgow. “In all history,” as the English art historian John Julius Norwich has put it, “no municipality has ever received from one of its native sons a gift of such munificence.” The Burrell Collection is not only vast (it contains around 8,000 items), but also of superlative quality. In Burrell’s famous assembly of French pictures (Boudin, Cézanne, Chardin, Courbet, Delacroix—and on through a whole alphabet of jouissance), among more than twenty works by Degas are the superb oil painting The Rehearsal and the beautifully toned pastel Jockeys in the Rain. In each of these, the artist makes daring pictorial use of apparently empty space and compositional diagonals. Burrell’s tapestry collection is among the best in the world. The vagaries of the sale room meant that he had to divide the Beaufort Tapestries with the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; but his portion, with its storks, lions, and unicorns, is energetically superb. Other tapestries he treasured feature fifteenth-century Burgundian peasants hunting rabbits with ferrets and nets; Dutch handlers trying to keep order among a procession of sixteenth-century camels; and Hercules on horseback, in shining armour and wearing a soft hat bearing his name, initiating the Olympic Games.
About a quarter of the Burrell treasure trove is made up of pieces from China, a favourite being the large, green-robed ceramic figure of a cross-legged Buddhist disciple—a lohan—which Sir William bought for £350. It was made in the autumn of 1484 by a craftsman called Liuzhen for a “believer Wang Jin-ao, his wife Miaojin, and his son Wang Qin and the priest Daoji.” So says the inscription on its side, and today that lohan features on a fine poster for the collection. Burrell was so concerned that his valuable artefacts should not be damaged by atmospheric pollution that it took Glasgow a long time to be able to meet the conditions of his bequest. In 1983, however, Queen Elizabeth II shook hands with Sir William’s smiling eighty-six-year-old daughter at the opening of the purpose-built Burrell Collection gallery on the south side of Glasgow in the 361-acre Pollok Park.
No museum on such a scale had been built in twentieth-century Britain. Designed by Barry Gasson and colleagues, it is designed to interact with the landscape. A great glass wall lets many of the exhibits be seen against nearby woodland, “making,” as Gasson put it, “the grass, the trees, the woodland plants, the bluebells and bracken, a context for the display of the Collection.” Well-loved by Glaswegians and tourists alike, the building re-creates rooms from Burrell’s castle, incorporates his hoard of medieval architecture and stained glass (some of it bought from the collection of William Randolph Hearst), and is a late twentieth-century visual triumph. Yet its success in no way outshines the beautiful parkland surrounding it—all highland cows, rhododendrons, and daffodils. Nor should it eclipse the nearby 1740s mansion, Pollok House, another Glasgow favourite, famous not least for its subtle and haunting El Greco portrait of a lady wearing a grey fur wrap. If Burrell’s wealth came from shipbuilding, shipowning and commerce, his name survives in the twenty-first century wholly translated into art.