A REPLICA of the stunning artistic centrepiece of the old Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow is to be installed in the restored building in Sauchiehall Street.
The Willow Wood gesso panel was a sculptural relief created by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s wife Margaret Macdonald and served as the centrepiece in Miss Cranston’s most extravagant room, the Salon de Luxe.
Although the original survives, it is too fragile to be moved from its home at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow and experts were asked to reproduce the famous piece exactly as it would have looked when the tea rooms opened in 1903.
Glasgow artists Dai and Jenny Vaughan, who have made gesso panels in Macdonald’s style before, have spent months painstakingly completing the work, which is set to be installed later this month.
In Mackintosh’s Tea Rooms, a BBC2 Scotland documentary to be shown tonight, Mr Vaughan says: “It is the central feature of the whole tea room. Mackintosh believed that the soul and heart of his interiors were the gesso panels. You can say this is the soul of the Willow Tea Rooms.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here