"strange linear patterns" and for the highly stylized human figures in their graphic and decorative work (Howarth 38). Their principal influence at this stage was the 'decadent' drawing style of Aubrey Beardsley (which they called "The Squirm Style") that became popular in the 1890s (Jones 21). This tendency earned them the nickname of "The Spook School," a name that left them unperturbed for, as Margaret said in an interview in The Studio magazine, "conventional distortions [such as caryatids] are accepted, why should not the worker today make patterns out of people?" (quoted in Jones 21).
The perceptive editor of The Studio, Gleeson White, was one of the few who was intrigued by the work of The Four in London. He met them and was impressed by their great versatility and the freshness of their ideas. Soon afterward he published two articles on the Glasgow designers and "at one stroke disclosed the presence of a flourishing and well-integrated school of design with its own distinctive characteristics" and one that seemed to be "completely independent of the English Arts and Crafts movement" (Howarth 39). But they were independent of this movement only to the extent that they had gone beyond it in many respects. Despite the fact that the English Arts and Crafts designers "stolidly maintained [their] attitude of scornful derision" (never again asking the Scots designers to show with them) the general stylistic approach of the movement was the basis of the Glasgow work and its traces remained apparent throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.
The Glasgow designers did not, for example, concern themselves with the social aims of the movement--to overcome the debilitating effects of the Industrial Revolution on the working class and educate them in beauty. But they did adopt the Arts and Crafts concept of "a well-designed environment--fashioned with beautiful and well-crafted buildings, furniture, tapestries and c...