Glasgow School Artist. Genre portraits in landscapes. The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Representative groups included The Four, the Glasgow Girls and the Glasgow Boys. Part of the international art nouveau movement, they were responsible for creating the distinctive Glasgow Style. Glasgow experienced an economic boom at the end of the 19th century, resulting in an increase in distinctive contributions to the Art Nouveau movement, particularly in the fields of architecture, interior design and painting. Among the most prominent definers of the Glasgow School collective were The Four. They were the painter and glass artist Margaret MacDonald, acclaimed architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, MacDonald's sister Frances and Herbert MacNair. Together, The Four defined the Glasgow Style's fusion of influences including the Celtic Revival, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Japonisme, which found favour throughout the modern art world of continental Europe. The Four, otherwise known as the Spook School, ultimately made a significant impact on the definition of Art Nouveau. The name, Spook School, or Spooky or Ghoul School, was originally a derisive epithet given to their work which distorted and conventionalized human. form. The Glasgow Girls is the name now used for a group of female designers and artists including Margaret and Frances MacDonald, both of whom were members of The Four, Jessie M. King, Annie French, Helen Paxton Brown, Jessie Wylie Newbery, Ann Macbeth, Bessie MacNicol, Norah Neilson Gray, Stansmore Dean, Eleanor Allen Moore, De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar, the silversmith Agnes Banks Harvey and Christian Jane Fergusson. May Wilson and Eliza Bell, among others, continued the tradition of ceramic artistry into the 1940s and 1950s by hand painting various items with floral patterns. Women were able to flourish in Glasgow during a period of enlightenment that took place between 1885 and 1920, where women were actively pursuing art careers and the Glasgow School of Art had a significant period of international visibility. This is sometimes attributed to the influential and progressive head of the art school, Fra Newbery, who established an environment in which women could flourish, both as students and as teachers. Women benefited from the new Glasgow Society of Lady Artists which offered a place for women artists to meet and also had exhibition space. In addition, many art school students and staff were involved in women's suffrage. Students took turns between classes stitching up banners for the movement. The name Glasgow Girls emerged much later. In the 1960s there was an attempt to give due attention to the work of the city's women artists to balance the plentiful discussion of the Glasgow Boys. It is thought that the then head of the Scottish Arts Council William Buchanan was the first to use the name in the catalogue for a 1968 Glasgow Boys exhibition. This invention has been called an ironic reference to the equivalent men's grouping. The term Glasgow Girls was emphasised by a major exhibition Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880-1920 organised by Jude Burkhauser in 1990. Through the 1880s and 1890s, around the same time that the Spook School was gaining prominence, a collective which came to be known as the Glasgow Boys was interpreting and expanding the canon of Impressionist and post-impressionist painting. Their subject matter featured rural, prosaic scenes from in and around Glasgow. Their colorful depictions attempted to capture the many facets of the character of Scotland. The Glasgow Boys consisted of several men, most of whom were trained in, or had strong ties to the city of Glasgow. These men were brought together by a passion for realism and naturalism and this showed through in the pieces they produced. Along with this passion for naturalism, they shared a marked distaste for the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment, which they viewed as oppressive. Driven and motivated by these ideals they embraced change, created masterpieces, and became Scottish icons in the process. There were three distinct waves of Glasgow Boys. The leading figures of the first wave were James Paterson and William York Macgregor, and the group used to meet at Macgregor's studio. The second wave was represented in Joseph Crawhall, Thomas Millie Dow, James Guthrie, George Henry, E. A. Hornel, James Whitelaw Hamilton and E. A. Walton.