Kate Cranston - The New Woman, the New Art and the Making of Modernity

Alannah Sparks
Trinity College Dublin
Department of History of Art and Architecture
2007
BA

Subject: Architecture, design
Country: Scotland
Period: 19th Century

10,000 words

This dissertation seeks to reevaluate the importance of Catherine Cranston, using a critical framework informed by feminist art criticism. Catherine Cranston, the author argues, is now mainly noted for her patronage of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, rather than for her own significant achievements in art and design. This study examines her innovative aesthetic vision for the Glasgow tea rooms in the light of the development of modernist values in both feminist and socio-aesthetic terms. The latter part of this work explores her contribution to a new form of ‘feminine’ art and connoisseurship, and reviews her patronage in a still broader context, presenting the idea of the tea rooms as a physical expression of contemporary European artistic thought. The final section examines Cranston’s promotion of the Glasgow school and style.

Irish Georgian Society

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Kate Cranston - The New Woman, the New Art and the Making of Modernity