How textile designer Althea McNish brought post-war London to life

18 June 2024

As a show of the artist's work opens at London’s William Morris Gallery, the curator describes her influence

18 June 2024

Textiles

Althea McNish working on murals for SS Oriana cruise ship, 1959. Courtesy N15 Archive

I first discovered the work of textile designer Althea McNish when the words ‘Caribbean Blaze’ caught my eye in the May/June 2005 issue of Crafts. My interest was immediately piqued because of my own family’s Caribbean heritage, then I saw her painterly designs of tropical plant life stretched out across six pages of the magazine. I was captivated by their riotous colour palettes and by Althea’s freedom of expression, which transported me to a place where I hadn’t yet been able to travel.

I was stunned to find myself reading about an artist from Trinidad who'd already had a 40-year career in the UK, yet I’d never heard of her. When I went to art school to study textiles in the 1980s and 90s, there were no Black creatives on the agenda. So I began researching the late designer – who had moved to Britain with her family in 1950 at the age of 26 – but there wasn’t a single book about her work, just the odd chapter or footnote, and she had only ever had small exhibitions. Through my current research, I am bringing her story to a new generation.

Orina, screen-printed on cotton, designed by Althea McNish for Danasco, c.1960s. Image: Nicola Tree, William Morris Gallery
Trinidad, designed by Althea McNish for Heal's in 1961, screen-printed cotton. Photo: © Goldsmiths, University of London

It’s astonishing when you consider her success. Just days after she graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1957, Arthur-Stewart Liberty – the chairman of Liberty of London – bought her entire graduation collection on the spot. He was so impressed with her work that he placed her in a taxi to see Zika Ascher, a fashion and textile entrepreneur who was well known in the industry for his use of artists’ designs for fashion fabrics. In Althea's words, this meeting would change her life. Alongside designing for Ascher and Liberty, the artist – who died in 2020 aged 95 – went on to create works for Heal’s, Cavendish Textiles, Hull Traders and Danasco; fashion houses, such as of Dior and Balenciaga; and many other well-know European and international design companies.

Painted Desert, designed by Althea McNish for Hull Traders in 1961, screen-printed cotton. Photo: © the Whitworth, The University of Manchester
Golden Harvest, designed by Althea McNish for Hull Traders c.1960s, screen-printed cotton. Photo: Private Collection

One of her works, Golden Harvest, was a best-seller for Hull Traders for over two decades, until it closed in 1980. It was inspired by a visit to the home of her RCA tutor Edward Bawden in Essex. There she saw wheat fields for the first time, which reminded her of the sugarcane plantations of her childhood in Trinidad. Althea sketched it at sunrise and sunset, using these drawings as inspiration for her design. Her strengths were her technical understanding and acuity, which gave her designs a freedom. She created the freehand effects you see in Golden Harvest by drawing directly onto the silk screen. When you take time to stand back and look at the work from afar, you can almost see the wheat sheaves and sugar canes wrestling in the wind. It was screen-printed in four different colour ways, but the best known is the sun-drenched golden and orange one. The work exemplifies her ‘tropical eye’ – as she described it to me when we eventually met in 2018. She brought a spirit of the Caribbean to everything she designed.

Soon after Althea arrived in the UK, she enrolled in a graphics course at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts (now the London College of Communication) before winning a scholarship for a postgraduate degree in textiles at the Royal College of Art. When she described her youth to me, she called herself ‘a wayward student’; she would skip classes to visit museums or to sketch the tropical plants on the roof of the RCA. While researching her life for the exhibition I have co-curated at London’s William Morris Gallery (2 April - 11 September 2022), I discovered her books of pressed flowers and drawings, as well as postcards of flora from Trinidad that often featured in her work.

Textile design by Althea McNish, c.1950s - 1960s. Courtesy N15 Archive/The Althea McNish Collection

Back then, graduates emerging from art school were using screen-printing instead of block-printing – a faster and cheaper process, and one that would also lead to the next step in quicker production runs, yet it allowed her to use the painting skills she had acquired in her youth. Drawing on the knowledge she learnt at the London School of Printing, she also pushed the boundaries of the printing process. ‘Whenever printers told me it couldn’t be done, I would show them how to do it,’ she once said. ‘Before long, the impossible became possible.’

Her designs often had many layers, with up to 17 colours, which meant that very few were ever copied. She even devised a way to print her designs directly onto panels of Warerite laminate when creating murals for the SS Oriana P&O cruise ship in 1960.

Murals designed by Althea McNish, in the Dining Room of the SS Oriana. © P&O Heritage

Althea came into the design industry at a time of change. The new homes being built had large picture windows and open-plan spaces, all of which demanded new treatments, bold designs, and fresh eyes. Her large, colourful and intense designs fitted the bill perfectly, and were a foil to post-war gloom in the UK.

I first reached out to Althea and her husband John Weiss, a jewellery designer, in October 2017. I asked them to verify that an unidentified work in the Goldsmiths Textile Collection – part of the Constance Howard Textile Gallery at Goldsmiths University, where I teach – was one of hers. It was her 1961 palm inspired design for Heal’s, called Trinidad. Althea and John were invited to be special guests at a talk held in the gallery at Goldsmiths in March 2018, where she discussed Trinidad and her wider work. After that, Althea and I met up a number of times, always in the IKEA in Tottenham, because she liked the lemon cake. She would make comments like, ‘they could do more with that textile’, or ‘that room doesn’t look quite right’. She carried an Allen key with her, a habit she acquired during the heydays of her career when she would visit the printers and tweak the settings on the print tables to ensure they produced her designs with the necessary accuracy. I think she continued to carry one in her later years to remind her of those times.

Althea Mcnish in the 1970s. Photo: Bill Patterson. Courtesy N15 Archive
'Caribbean blaze', the profile of Althea McNish in the May/June 2005 issue of Crafts

I asked Althea if she had met racism in her career and she said that her father told her not to dwell on it, and instead focus on being herself. She said to me: ‘All I wanted to do was open doors for others.’ After her death, a few years after John’s, I was looking through their archives and I discovered that they had wanted to mount a retrospective of her work in 1988. They even wrote an exhibition plan. I have drawn from this for the William Morris Gallery exhibition as a way to bring her voice into the show. One of the highlights will be a modern recreation of the ‘Bachelor Girl’s Room’ she designed for the 1966 Ideal Home Show in London, conceived as space for the modern girl about town. Incorporating her botanical Lumiere design for Cavendish Textiles (then part of department store John Lewis), the room was beamed in colour by BBC Two onto TV sets in homes across the nation. It exemplifies her influence on the design aesthetics of the time, yet her work has been completely left out of the design history canon.

To help the exhibition (co-curated by the William Morris Gallery’s principal curator Rowan Bain) come to fruition, I applied for a research grant from the Antiquaries Society. Part of my mission is to correct the inaccuracies that abound about her life, using a range of archival material. The research project will continue into 2024, her centenary year, when I hope to have more outcomes from the work. The exhibition at William Morris Gallery is sponsored by Liberty Fabrics, which is reissuing a capsule collection of her designs this spring.

Althea once said: ‘I wanted to change all those little dots that women were walking around with on their skirts. I wanted to create something for women that was more in sympathy with their bodies [...] I think that's what took me into textiles.’ Soon a new generation will be able to wear Althea McNish’s work – and will understand how the designer changed the world with her colourful visions.

‘Althea McNish: Colour is Mine’ runs from 2 April 2022 to 11 September 2022 at London’s William Morris Gallery

Read our 2005 interview with Althea McNish in our digital archive

How textile designer Althea McNish brought post-war London to life

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