Music

David Gauld was an important Glasgow artist and designer. His most distinctive paintings and prints were often graphic and decorative in character, so it is no surprise that he took up stained glass design in the late 1880s. Greatly influenced by Japanese art, Gauld became the first Glasgow artist to begin the process of abstracting the human figure, moving away from the naturalistic treatment of the preceding generation of artists towards the stylised two-dimensional designs that culminate in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Macdonald sisters and Jessie Marion King. In this piece the simplicity of the figure and the landscape comes to the fore. Gauld began working with the Hugh McCulloch studio in 1891 – a studio that would go on to produce some of the most celebrated Glasgow leaded glasswork ever made, for Mackintosh’s Willow Tea Rooms. For McCulloch’s, Gauld designed a set of eight panels for the bay window of a Glasgow music room, each of which featured a woman playing a musical instrument. This panel could have been made for the series, or for another ‘Music’ series for an as yet unknown house.