Profile: William Leiper, Glasgow's 'forgotten' architect

Through wallboards, models and other artworks inspired by Leiper, Glasgow’s hitherto forgotten “other architect” will be celebrated in this exhibition which runs as part of Scotland’s year-long Festival of Architecture.

WILLIAM WHO?

BORN in 1839, William Leiper was educated at his father’s small primary school in Glasgow’s George Street and was apprenticed to Boucher and Cousland’s architectural practice at the age of 15 or 16. By the time he was 23, he was project manager of Dublin’s Findlater Church, a huge Gothic construction which features in James Joyce’s Ulysses. A couple of years later, his reputation was sealed when he won a competition to design the Dowanhill United Presbyterian Church, now Cottiers.

Leiper became a leading architect in the Gothic style, designing churches, public buildings such as Partick Burgh Halls, residential buildings in Helensburgh, and commercial buildings such as the Templeton Carpet Factory and the red sandstone giant of the Sun Insurance Offices – now Sarti’s restaurant and the Leiper Gallery itself.

Between 1904 and 1932, the gallery was run by Alex Reid, a friend to some of the biggest names in European art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Described as “a prince among dealers” by Tom Honeyman, director of Kelvingrove Art Gallery between 1939 and 1954 and the man who brought Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross to Glasgow, Reid briefly shared a flat in Paris with Theo and Vincent van Gogh. The latter’s portrait of Reid in the Kelvingrove is often mistaken for a Vincent self-portrait.

COTTIERS OR LEIPER’S?

HISTORY has occasionally been unfair to the Gothic prodigy. When the Four Acres Trust acquired the Dowanhill Church in the 1980s, there was debate as to whether it should be known as Cottiers or Leiper’s. Daniel Cottier, who soon after emigrated to the US where he became an influential art dealer, was only responsible for the (admittedly hugely beautiful) stained-glass and stencilled decoration. Leiper, on the other hand, designed

90 per cent of the rather wild Gothic structure, its wide single-span roof, impressive hall and 13th-century entrance delighting the congregation who seemed untroubled by the predominantly English association of the style with Catholicism.

“What on earth were they doing commissioning a Gothic palace for themselves?” asks Ewan Kennedy, who runs the Leiper Gallery, after noting that many of the United Presbyterians later joined with the Free Church who traditionally favoured more austere styles.

“But people loved it,” he says. “It was a wealthy, west end congregation who wanted to spend as much as they could on this lavish extravagance.

“When they established this church, they also established a ‘relief church’ down Partick way, presumably as they didn’t want a lot of working-class people coming.”

TEMPLETON’S PALACE

LEIPER’S commercial commissions were few but memorable, even eccentric, to contemporary eyes. Built between 1893 and 1894, the Sun Insurance Offices in West George Street contrasted a sleek modern interior – including electric lifts – with an exterior which looked to the ornate Gothic style popular during the reign of Francois I in the 16th century.

If you look at the building through binoculars, you might make out Leiper’s homage to Michelangelo’s Tomb of the Medici in Florence, though the figures in the Glaswegian’s version are clothed more appropriately for the

Scottish climate.

Leiper had also looked to Italy a few years earlier. Wanting a replacement for the rough wooden shacks which housed his regimented workforce of mostly young women, the story goes that James Templeton asked Leiper to design him “the most beautiful building in the world”.

Leiper said: “Well, that’s the Doge’s Palace in Venice.”

Templeton said: “Well, I want one of those.”

During high winds in November 1889, a part of the new factory collapsed on to the sheds, killing 29 of the women locked within. The youngest were aged 14.

Leiper and his talented apprentice Willie Anderson were devastated. Another fatal accident on one of his own projects led to Anderson taking his own life at the age of 32.

The exhibition does not shy away from these darker moments, and instead explores the impact of disease on the city, and that of the 1878 Glasgow Bank Crash which left many families ruined.

The crash spurred the then 40-year-old Leiper to move to Paris, where he studied fine art and hung out with Guthrie-born Arthur Melville, an artist whose vivid depictions of the exotic East were a key influence on the Glasgow School, and who – according to an associate of Kennedy’s – “was undoubtedly a spy for the British Government”.

POPOV’S BATTLESHIP

TWO models feature in the exhibition: one is a straight-forward architectural model by Keppie Design of the new West Dunbartonshire Council offices, incorporating the Leiper-designed former Academy and public halls.

The other is not straight-forward at all. In 1880 Russian Tsar Alexander II commissioned John Elder of Govan to build a saucer-shaped battleship based on ideas by naval designer Admiral Popov. You read that correctly: a saucer-shaped, round battleship. The Livadia wasn’t really a battleship though, it was a yacht for the Tsar for which no expense was to be spared, with electric lights, ornate marble interiors and an opulent banqueting hall designed by Leiper.

“It was as utterly and completely as mad as you can get,” says Kennedy, recalling that, as a child, “everyone in Glasgow knew about ‘Admiral Popov’s battleship’.”

He says: “Popov was playing around in the Black Sea with circular ships but they weren’t getting them to work properly. Then John Elder died, but the yard was continuing to develop these designs. And they were commissioned to build this yacht, but the purpose of it was to test this technology.”

A fully-detailed model of the Livadia, built by James Pierce of Ambleside in Cumbria, will feature in the show and is the single example of naval architecture in the year-long festival.

GENUIS STEALS

HAVING assembled a number of specialists to research and write for the show, Kennedy hopes to organise funds for a book on Leiper – none have been written to date. Whereas Glasgow officialdom may be proud of its Alexander “Greek” Thomson buildings and happy to market those of Charles Rennie Macintosh, Leiper’s are rarely as celebrated.

Kennedy says many find Gothic buildings, with their Victorian heaviness and finicky ornament, anathema. Many of Glasgow’s were demolished as part of the modernising Bruce Plan of the post-war era. Or perhaps Leiper is relatively forgotten because he so immersed his work in the Gothic that he didn’t have a distinctive style of his own.

This, Kennedy explains, would be to miss the point.

“You could also say that also of Greek Thomson – he didn’t invent those forms, he just nicked them from the Greeks. So why doesn’t Leiper get away with that too? And Rennie Macintosh was also a bit of a plagiarist, though of course I really shouldn’t say that.

He pinched earlier Scottish baronial forms, and in the Lake District there’s a house called Blackwell House, designed by HM Bailey Scott. It is House for An Art Lover. It was built in 1898, and Macintosh was in it. So all these guys stole from each other.”

What makes Leiper buildings really remarkable, Kennedy says, is their technicality.

“His buildings actually worked. They were state-of-the-art and had electricity when Glasgow was going mad for electricity. He was able to work technically in these new mediums. Juxtaposed with that old Gothic style, I think that’s really quite special.”

The William Leiper exhibition runs from May 26 to September 18 at The Leiper Fine Art Gallery, West George Street, Glasgow www.leiperfineart.com

On June 27 at 7pm there is a mini conference on Leiper at Cottier’s Theatre, as part of the West End Festival bit.ly/LeiperConf