Frances Macdonald, the sister of Margaret, was born in 1873 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art with her sister.  There they met Herbert MacNair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh who were to become their respective husbands and collectively whose work would become known as the ‘Glasgow Style’. 

Regretfully, Frances MacNair’s achievements are not so widely known as her sister’s.  This is probably due to the fact that she left Glasgow in 1889 and joined her husband in Liverpool where she worked as a teacher at the School of Architecture and Applied Art.  Also, following her death in 1921, her husband destroyed much of her work. 

Nevertheless, she produced some powerful work of the ‘Glasgow Style’ and following her return to Glasgow in 1909, painted some moving watercolours relating to marriage and motherhood.