The Magazine

About The Magazine

The Magazine is an illustrated handwritten journal which was circulated among a group of friends who were associated with the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1890s. Its four volumes are dated ‘1893’, ‘April 1894’, ‘November 1894’, and ‘Spring 1896’. They contain 33 textual pieces of which 14 are poems, and 104 illustrations ranging from pen and ink drawings, to watercolours, photographs, photogravures and etchings, many produced by significant artists at the beginning of their careers.

The Magazine, with its illustrations, head and tail pieces, essays and poems, has a similar format and range of contents to some other contemporary art and literary journals particularly the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884-1892) which could have been its inspiration, as one of the Guild’s members William Kellock Brown was Glasgow School of Art’s modelling master and taught repoussé metalwork to several of the contributors.

From its inception up to the 1940s the four numbers of The Magazine were in the hands of its editor Lucy Raeburn (Mrs Spottiswoode Ritchie). By 1949, however, when it was acquired by the Glasgow School of Art it appears to have passed into the hands of Mrs Ritchie’s friend Katharine Cameron Kay, who had also been a contributor. The letter to the School’s Director, Douglas Percy Bliss, which accompanied Cameron’s gift, reads as follows:

Thomas Howarth, Mackintosh’s biographer, was the first to note the existence of the volumes earlier in the 1940s when they were still in the possession of Lucy Raeburn. Howarth referred to them as “Scrap Books” and intriguingly wrote “only four of these books remain, covering the years 1893-5”. It is clear from his description of their contents, however, that Howarth examined the same volumes that are now in the collection of the Glasgow School of Art and that his dating of the last volume to 1895 was inaccurate. Howarth’s error almost certainly derives from the date “January 1895” on two of Mackintosh’s watercolours, The Tree of Influence and The Tree of Personal Effort which appear in the 1896 volume. This was an easy mistake to make as Howarth would probably not have had The Magazine to hand when he was referring back to his notes.

Does it therefore follow that his suggestion, possibly only a slip of the pen, that there had been other issues, was also mistaken? One piece of evidence to the contrary is a three-part story ‘Svend the Swineherd’ in the 1894 volumes with its middle section missing, suggesting the possible existence of a lost summer number for that year. There are also no surviving volumes for 1895 although there is one for 1896. It seems more likely, however, that Raeburn did not have enough items for 1895 and placed them together in her final 1896 volume which is longer than the others and which includes Mackintosh’s two watercolours, mentioned above, which were obviously intended for 1895. She may also have excluded other items as there were two other drawings in her collection which Howarth featured in his biography of Mackintosh: Margaret Macdonald’s The Story of a River and Mackintosh’s Spring. The latter carried the inscription “Spring Number: Lucy Raeburn: her Magazine”, indicating that it was intended for one of the Spring issues and Howarth even mistakenly remembered it as decorating the cover of the Spring issue for 1894. The two drawings are untraced and there is nothing to indicate that they were among the items gifted to the Glasgow School of Art by Katharine Cameron.

Howarth, from the point of view of the 1940s, wrote that the remarkable watercolours by Mackintosh and the Macdonald sisters were ‘trivial and ill-conceived’ with ‘little real artistic merit’ seeing them merely as attempts ‘to evolve an original style’. Although one of the volumes, and perhaps more than one, was shown in an exhibition of Mackintosh’s work at the Saltire Society in Edinburgh in 1953, by 1968 the significance and quality of the watercolours was being reassessed. For the major centenary exhibition of Mackintosh’s career, again in Edinburgh, seven of the illustrations from The Magazine, five by Mackintosh and two by the Macdonald sisters were extracted and shown as separate items. Some of these watercolours have been returned to their relevant pages but others are still separate items in the Glasgow School of Art’s collection. They are shown in their original positions on this website.

Recent Developments

The Magazine (a student publication by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his contemporaries at the Glasgow School of Art) is one of a large and growing number of important items that make up the GSA museum collection. This collection is almost exclusively the work of former staff and students of the School from the late 19th century to the present day and covers areas of fine art, design and architecture. It includes a collection of over 300 examples by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and is complemented by an extensive institutional archive.

In 2001 the GSA secured Registered status for its museum collection and in 2008 became an Accredited Museum. In 2009 the School's Charles Rennie Mackintosh collection was named as a Recognised Collection of National Significance by Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS) and in 2010 received £36,988 in Recognition grant funding from MGS for its Magazine project. This important award allowed for the full conservation of The Magazine (undertaken by the Book and Paper Conservation Studio at the University of Dundee), and the digitisation of all four volumes (carried out by UK Archiving Ltd, Edinburgh).

The Magazine is a rare and much valued source of information for researchers and academics. This new website not only disseminates the contents of The Magazine to as wide an audience as possible, but importantly reduces the need to access the original and increasingly delicate volumes themselves.