From November 2023 to February 2024, The Hunterian mounted an extraordinary exhibition, Stage and Screen: Designs from the James L Gordon Collection.
Joseph Sharples, Curator of Mackintosh and Applied Art and Design Collection at The Hunterian, reflects on this eclectic display.
The ‘Stage and Screen’ exhibition brought together over 400 costume and set designs for theatre, film and television. All of the artwork came from the vast collection of Paisley-born interior designer Jim Gordon.
Drawings and paintings covered the walls of the gallery from floor to ceiling. Visitors were amazed by the variety and profusion of what was on show: everything from Shakespeare to Shirley Bassey, from Don Giovanni to Doctor Who.
You can download a full list of all the items in the exhibition – ‘Stage and Screen List of Works‘.
Jim Gordon was born in 1940. After leaving school at the age of 15, he got a job with the well-known Glasgow furnishers Wylie & Lochhead. In the 1960s he moved to London, where he joined the interior designers Denis Lennon & Partners. One of his most high-profile jobs was designing the casino on board the luxury ocean liner QE2.
It was in 1983 that Jim began collecting designs for the theatre. In that year, he bought a single costume design by Cecil Beaton for the Broadway musical Coco. Forty years on, his collection now numbers over 5000 works.
It is Jim’s very generous intention to bequeath his amazing collection to The Hunterian. It will be a hugely valuable resource, both for study and display. Works by leading artists like Paul Nash, Christopher Wood and David Hockney will greatly enhance The Hunterian’s holdings of 20th-century British art.
At the same time, students of theatre, film and television will find the collection enormously rewarding. It offers great insight into the history of production design.
But just as theatre and cinema reflect every aspect of life and society, so the collection contains material that touches on a range of broader topics. This blog post explores four of these themes: Women Designers, Glasgow and Scotland, LGBTQI+ Representation, and Black Presence.
1. Women Designers
Women artists are often underrepresented in museums and art galleries. However, their prominence in the world of theatre design means they loom large in Jim Gordon’s collection.
Important early designers represented include Alice Vansittart Comyns Carr (1850–1927), who worked closely with the leading Victorian actress Ellen Terry, and Russian-born Sophie Fedorovitch (1893–1953), whose work was central to the development of British ballet design in the 1930s and 40s.
Traditional perceptions of dressmaking and needlework as ‘female’ activities may have encouraged earlier generations of women to pursue careers in costume design, but women have long excelled in set design as well. Examples include Tanya Moiseiwitsch (1914–2003), who was also closely involved in the design of theatre buildings such as the Sheffield Crucible.
Dorothy Carleton Smyth (1880–1933) was a multi-talented Glasgow artist who worked as a painter and illustrator as well as a costume designer. In 1933 she was appointed head of the Glasgow School of Art – the first woman to achieve this distinction – but she died before she could take up the post.
She designed the costumes for a production of Puccini’s opera La bohème by the impresario Thomas Quinlan. This production toured Britain, South Africa and Australia in 1910–11.
This design for the tragic seamstress Mimi and one of her male friends has echoes of Adolfo Hohenstein’s designs for the opera’s 1896 premiere in Turin, but Smyth has given the costumes her own individual stamp.
Carefully executed on fine linen laid on board, it doesn’t look like a working design. It is more like a painting to be framed and displayed.
More examples of Smyth’s theatre designs are illustrated here on the Glasgow School of Art website.
The sisters Sophie Harris (1900–66) and Margaret (known as Percy) Harris (1904–2000), along with their friend Elizabeth Montgomery (1902–93), were a trio of women designers who worked together under the name Motley.
In their designs for historical plays, they succeeded in evoking the mood and feel of the past without slavishly trying to recreate it. They were pioneers in the use of simple, rough fabrics to create an illusion of richness. They set up a training course in theatre design, which had an important influence on many younger designers.
One of Motley’s early commissions was for the British premiere of Noah, a version of the biblical story of the Flood by French playwright André Obey. The play includes several animals among its cast of characters.
Motley’s design for the Sheep is inscribed with the name of actress Susan Salaman. She was also a designer, responsible for the costumes for the original production of Noah in France.
The director Michel Saint-Denis asked Motley to design the sets for the London production, but he wanted to use Salaman again for the costumes. However, Motley were determined to do both sets and costumes, and eventually they got their way.
The animal costumes were so heavily padded that they proved uncomfortably hot, and the actors sweated so much that it was impossible to get the costumes dry between matinees and evening performances.
The Motley archive is held at the University of Illinois in America. You can see many more examples of Motley’s designs on their website.
In a 1954 newspaper interview, theatre designer Fanny Taylor said that she originally wanted to be an artist, but she turned to set and costume design instead because it was a less solitary way of earning a living. This fluid brush drawing of a clown’s costume for the Russian play, He Who Gets Slapped, shows her skill as a painter:
Taylor began her career in the theatre in the 1940s, but later she moved into television and worked for many years for the BBC. In 1958 she collaborated on a landmark BBC dramatisation of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, basing her designs on careful historical research.
Over the next two decades, she designed numerous one-off plays and series for the small screen, including elegant costume dramas of the kind for which the BBC became famous.
2. Glasgow and Scotland
Jim Gordon has made a point of collecting designs that reflect his origins in the West of Scotland and his strong links with the city of Glasgow. Glasgow actors like Adrienne Corrie, Glasgow venues like the Citizens Theatre, and Glasgow-trained designers like John Macfarlane and John Byrne are all represented.
There are designs for films set in Scotland, ranging from Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948) and The Master of Balantrae (1953) to Tam Lin (1970) and Braveheart (1994). A highlight of the collection is an extraordinary group of designs by Edward Burra for the ballet Miracle in the Gorbals (1944), set in the Glasgow slums.
Burra visited Glasgow to prepare for the commission, and the designs reflect his keen interest in the rough but vigorous life of the city’s streets.
The small watercolour below by John Absolon (1815–95) and William Telbin (1813–73) is the earliest work in Jim’s collection. It’s also a fascinating piece of Glasgow history.
It’s a sketch for the act drop of the City Theatre. This large building was controversially erected in 1845 on the edge of Glasgow Green, an important public open space in the city’s East End.
The act drop was a huge decorative painting that filled the proscenium arch and hid the stage from the audience during scene changes. Rich in vivid detail – just like a play – it was an attraction in its own right.
Newspaper advertisements described the subject of the act drop as “The garden and palace of Hampton Court with the introduction of Shakespeare to Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Southampton”. The City Theatre opened on 12 July 1845, but only five months later the building and everything in it was burned to the ground.
This little watercolour – just 17 x 20 cm – is both a unique record of a lost work of art, and a precious relic of a brief chapter in Glasgow’s theatrical history.
The drawing below is not only by a Scottish artist, it also depicts a Scottish performer.
Portrait painter and theatre designer Doris Zinkeisen (1897–1991) was born in Dunbartonshire, down the River Clyde from Glasgow, although her family moved to England while she was still a girl. She trained at the Harrow School of Art and the Royal Academy schools in London.
The drawing is a costume design for Cole Porter’s 1933 musical Nymph Errant. It represents a noted dancer of the day known as Eve. Eve was the stage name of Isabella McMurray, the daughter of music hall artistes David and Caroline McMurray.
It is often difficult to establish where theatrical performers lived because their work involved frequent moves from place to place, but the McMurrays seem to have been based in Glasgow when they were not touring. Isabella, however, was born while her parents were on the road in England.
Eve began performing at an early age. She was working as a contortionist when she was ‘discovered’ by the famous impresario C B Cochran. Her earliest training as a dancer came from her mother, but Cochran arranged for her to be coached by the celebrated choreographers Leonid Massine and Buddy Bradley. She won rave reviews for her performance in Nymph Errant. Zinkeisen’s design is for her big solo number, set in a Turkish harem.
The final drawing in this Scottish-themed selection is a puzzle.
The time shown on the clock face suggests we are looking at a poster design for the Five Past Eight Show, a popular entertainment combining song, dance and comedy, which was a fixture at Glasgow’s Alhambra Theatre in the 1950s and 60s. However, the style of the drawing is more typical of the 1930s.
It is signed by Tony Gibbons (born in 1891), who regularly designed posters for the theatre-owning company Howard & Wyndham. Howard & Wyndham owned the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, where they staged a predecessor to the Five Past Eight Show called the Half Past Eight Show, beginning in 1933.
Could it be that Gibbons reused an old design which he originally made for the earlier show, simply by changing the time on the clock face?
3. LGBTQI+ Representation
The theatre can be a place of disguise, fantasy and escapism. It can also be a place of dissent, transgression and self-expression. Individuals who don’t conform to society’s norms – including sexual norms – have often been drawn to the theatre, whether as performers, creatives or spectators.
Jim Gordon’s collection includes works by many LGBTQI+ designers, from Cecil Beaton to Derek Jarman. The collection also features designs for productions that deal with LGBTQI+ themes, or that have special resonance for LGBTQI+ audiences.
Although an unfamiliar name today, Percy Anderson (1851–1928) was a prolific and critically acclaimed designer in his day. During a career that lasted more than forty years, he designed costumes for plays, operas and musical comedies on both sides of the Atlantic.
These were often spectacular productions with enormous casts. One of his most successful shows was the ‘oriental’ musical Chu Chin Chow, which opened at His Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1916. It ran for a record-breaking five years.
With his brilliant sense of colour, shape and line, Anderson was a forerunner of the celebrated 20th-century Russian designer Leon Bakst.
Despite his achievements, Anderson has never been the subject of a full biography, and because of the time at which he lived, newspaper articles and obituaries are silent about his personal life.
However, some insights can be found in the private writings of his friends and contemporaries. He lived at one time with the bisexual American journalist Morton Fullerton, and towards the end of his life, he had a relationship with the successful novelist Hugh Walpole, who was thirty years his junior.
Walpole wrote of him: “He has all the knowledge and reminiscence of his age, and at the same time he doesn’t seem in the least bit old. Anyhow, he wants somebody and I want somebody, so that’s all right.”
The two designs for Chu Chin Chow reproduced above are inscribed as Christmas gifts “to H. W.” and were possibly presented by the artist to Walpole.
Edith Craig (1869–1947) was the daughter of the great Shakespearian actress Ellen Terry (you can see Terry as Portia in the costume designed for her by Alice Vansittart Comyns Carr reproduced earlier in this blog post).
Besides performing and directing, Craig also designed costumes and established her own theatrical costume company, Edith Craig & Co.
The Terrys were a numerous clan of theatre professionals. Craig’s uncle, Fred Terry, was also an actor. He starred as Lord Bothwell in the original 1923 production of The Borderer, a historical drama about Mary Queen of Scots. When he reprised the role in a 1929 revival of the play, Craig designed the costumes.
Craig was a committed feminist and suffragist who supported progressive political causes through her theatre work. In her private life, too, she rejected convention and tradition. From 1899, she lived with the writer Christabel Marshall, who went by the name of Christopher Marie St John.
In 1916, they were joined in a female menage à trois by the artist Clare Atwood, known as Tony. The three women are said to have attended London’s Hampstead Theatre wearing black, military-looking capes and hats, earning them the nickname The Three Musketeers.
One of the leading theatrical designers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Charles Ricketts (1866-1931). On his sixteenth birthday, he met the painter Charles Haslewood Shannon, and the pair went on to live publicly together in a life-long creative and domestic partnership. This was remarkable at a time when sexual relationships between men were illegal.
The design above is for Philip the King, a 1914 verse drama about King Philip II of Spain by John Masefield. It shows a religious procession of Dominican friars carrying banners, and it reveals Ricketts’ sense of spectacle and pageantry.
Ricketts must have dashed it off, scribbled some colour notes in the margin, then folded it up and posted it to the play’s director, Harley Granville Barker: stuck to the back of the folded drawing are two postage stamps, along with Barker’s address at the Kingsway Theatre.
Ricketts and Shannon were avid collectors of Asian art, and Ricketts’ knowledge of Japanese prints and Persian miniatures fed into his work for the stage. In 1922, he made several costume designs for a projected production of the Indian play Sakuntala, an ancient mythical tale of love, loss and reunion. Sadly, these extraordinarily beautiful designs were never used.
4. Black Presence
The way non-Europeans have been depicted on the British stage reflects Britain’s long history as an Imperial and colonial power. Derogatory stereotypes have been widespread, and non-European characters have often been represented as marginal, inferior, or not to be taken seriously.
In musicals and pantomimes, as well as in ballet and opera, countries like China and India have been portrayed in a superficial and unrealistic way: they have been generalised as mysterious and exotic, beautiful but barbaric.
Until the late 20th century, it was considered acceptable for Black characters to be played by white performers wearing black make up.
Given all this, it is not surprising that actors and other creatives of colour in theatre, film and television have struggled to achieve recognition and equal status with their white colleagues.
This impressionistic drawing by the Glasgow painter George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) was made at the King’s Theatre, Bath Street, in 1930. It shows the set for Ever Green, a musical produced by the well-known impresario C B Cochran (Hunter was a friend of Cochran’s, so he had access to the theatre during rehearsals).
The dance numbers for Ever Green were arranged by Buddy Bradley (1905–72), a successful and prolific African American choreographer. Racial discrimination meant that Bradley received little credit for his work in the United States.
In Britain, however, his contribution was publicly acknowledged, and he was able to ride a wave of enthusiasm for Black music and dance. He was invited to London in 1930, specifically to work on Ever Green, and he stayed until 1968. He worked with leading stars on major shows and films, and he also ran a successful dance school.
As already mentioned, he was one of the choreographers who helped shape the career of Glasgow dancer Eve. More information about Bradley is provided by researcher Annette Walker, and there is a useful overview of his career and significance at taplegacy.org.
The Rake’s Progress is a ballet based on a series of eight moralising narrative paintings by the 18th-century English artist William Hogarth. It was choreographed by Ninette de Valois and first performed by the Vic-Wells Ballet in London in 1935.
The costumes were designed by the young artist Rex Whistler (1905–44) and they are closely based on Hogarth’s paintings. This one is inscribed “Black Servant”:
The design is based on one of the female figures in the third of Hogarth’s paintings, which depicts an orgy. In Hogarth’s painting, the young woman is largely hidden by other figures near the right-hand edge of the composition, but her white cap and its pink ribbon are clearly visible. These are faithfully reproduced in Whistler’s costume design.
However, Whistler has also given her an exaggerated grin and missing teeth, which is not how she is depicted by Hogarth. Whistler seems to have deliberately turned her into a grotesque caricature, although it is fair to say that other characters in the ballet are depicted in a similarly unflattering way.
What is more significant is that the drawing is inscribed with the names of Jill Gregory and Joy Robson, two white dancers with the Vic-Wells Ballet.
It was probably intended that Gregory and Robson would alternate with each other in the role of the Black Servant, and presumably they would have performed in black make up.
It is still the case today that the world of classical ballet is predominantly white, even as Black dancers have become prominent in areas such as contemporary dance and musical theatre. More information about this topic is available on the Black British Ballet website.
Born in Bangalore, India, Ram Gopal (1912–2003) first danced in the West in the 1930s. He returned after the Second World War and settled in London. He was a pioneer in introducing classical Indian dance to Western audiences.
His performances were renowned not just for the beauty of the dancing, but also for authentic costumes, jewellery and music.
This newsreel from 1947 shows him dancing among Indian artworks at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. More information about Ram Gopal is available at the South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive and in this documentary film.
Ram Gopal was briefly married to Edith Alexander. She is thought to have made this design for a backcloth for one of his productions. Comparable scenery, based on traditional Indian sources, can be seen in photographs of his performances at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the 1950s and 60s.
Writer and composer Lionel Bart is best remembered today for his popular 1960 musical Oliver! Two years later, he had another success with Blitz! This show was set in the working-class East End of London during the bombing raids of the Second World War.
A notable aspect of the original 1962 production of Blitz! was the way it used actors of appropriate ethnicity to represent the diversity of the wartime East End. The cast included performers of South Asian and Chinese heritage, while the role of Buddy Boy was played by Caribbean-born Mark Heath (1926–2016).
Heath was born in Jamaica and came to the UK in 1944. As well as performing on stage, he made numerous film and TV appearances in his long career. Like many Black actors, he found himself cast in minor, stereotyped roles. However, he also appeared in serious plays about contemporary social issues.
Not just a performer, he also wrote and composed for the stage. As Marcus Heath, he wrote Napoleon Noir, a play about the late 18th century Black Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture. He also composed a musical, Bakerloo to Paradise, which toured nationally.
These are just a few of the themes that can be explored through Jim Gordon’s extraordinary collection. The collection isn’t only a treasure trove of beautiful drawings, it’s also an endlessly rich source of insights into the past, reflected through the media of theatre, film and television.
This post forms part of the research for our exhibition Stage and Screen: Designs from the James L Gordon Collection.
If you have any further information or queries about the works reproduced, please get in touch with us.
There are more brilliant blogs by Joseph and others stretching right across our collection for you to explore – covering coins, medals and much more!
