GLASGOW LINK CELEBRATED IN MORRIS PANEL

COLLECTORS’

Illustrated from a turn-of-the year sale at Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, is one of the best decorative brass panels seen at auction in recent times. High praise for a Glasgow School Symbolist repoussé panel created and crafted around 1900 by the artist and prolific book designer Talwin Morris (1865-1911). Framed in dark wood and measuring approximately 7 x 7 inches, the panel captures the dynamic bending of artistic boundaries at Glasgow School of Art.

After spending part of his early career working as an art editor in London, Talwin Morris took up a post as arts manager for Glasgow publisher Blackie & Son in 1893, a position he held until his death in 1911.

Encouraged by his boss Robert Blackie, who sat on the committee of Glasgow School of Art, Morris introduced ideas from the English Arts and Crafts movement to Scotland. He designed and crafted metalwork, borrowing elegant lines and shapes from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work. The two were friends and it was Morris who recommended Mackintosh as the architect for Hill House in Helensburgh.

Morris also contributed designs for Mackintosh’s Scottish Room at the Turin Exhibition in 1902, a room dominated, as it turned out, by the brilliant work of the Glasgow Girls.

Best known for his book design, Morris also produced pieces of furniture, textiles and metal work, which were incorporated into many of his decorative schemes, including his own home at Dunglass Castle in Dunbartonshire.

Here, the influence from the Glasgow School is most evident in the heavily stylised features of the female figure, as well as a concerted effort to express the linear and abstract.

The panel was sold for £4,750.

Decorative brass panel, Lyon and Turnbull.