Glasgow School

Glasgow School. A term that has been applied to several groups of artists whose activities have centred on Glasgow. The largest of these groups, which was at its peak in the last years of the 19th century, consisted mainly of painters who challenged the conservatism of the Royal Scottish Academy; they preferred to be known as the Glasgow Boys. A slightly later group, of which Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the leading member, created a distinctive Scottish version of Art Nouveau; the four principal members of this group are also known as the Glasgow Four. These two groups are distinct, but there is a slight overlap between them, as George Walton (1867–1933), a painter and designer who sometimes worked with Mackintosh, was the brother of the Glasgow Boy E. A. Walton. ( Cecile Walton, the daughter of E. A. Walton, was a member of the Edinburgh Group.)

More recently, the term ‘Glasgow School’ (or facetiously ‘Glasgow pups') has been applied to a group of figurative painters working in the city from the 1980s. They include Steven Campbell, Ken Currie (1960– ), Peter Howson (1958– ), and Adrian Wiszniewski (1958– ), all of whom were students at Glasgow School of Art at much the same time. (Among their teachers there was Sandy Moffat (1943– ), who encouraged a return to figurative art after the ‘anything goes’ 1970s.) Duncan Macmillan (Scottish Art in the 20th Century, 1994) writes: ‘In this group, Campbell, who was considerably older than the others, was the undoubted driving force … The success of this group as a whole was an important factor in Glasgow's cultural renaissance.’