[This is extracted, and in places expanded, from an online talk I gave to Glasgow City Heritage Trust on 28 June 2023. For a brief guided tour of the View, see the video; versions will appear on the blog in due course.]

George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow is one of the most fascinating documents of mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow, but it is much less well-known than Thomas Sulman’s celebrated print from a decade later. It’s the key to a number of stories, some of which I’ll write up here eventually: in this post I want to set out the background and try to give the artist some of the recognition he deserves.

When you picked up your copy of the Glasgow Herald on 20 December 1852 you’d have seen this advert. It was placed by the publisher and printseller Morison Kyle, and it advertised “An Elaborate Bird’s Eye-View of Glasgow”, drawn by a young local artist, George McCulloch, and printed by the high-end London firm of Day & Son.

Kyle was a canny publicist, who would later become known as a music publisher and promoter — in the 1860s he would take out adverts condemning the Council when they refused to licence his opera shows in the City Halls — and in advertising the View he played heavily on civic pride. He arranged for the two Glasgow MPs to have a sneak preview of the work, and duly recorded their supportive comments, and he ensured that various Glasgow newspapers also published advance reviews.

The print went on sale on 1 January 1853, at 30/- for a proof and 21/- for a print. (There seems to have been no difference between them except that the proofs, clearly labelled as such, were a limited run of 250.) It’s not clear how many were produced, but I’m aware of seven surviving copies: four held by Glasgow Museums, one in the Mitchell Library, one in the Hunterian, and one in private ownership. There is also a high-resolution scan held by the University of Strathclyde Archives, which they might share with you if you ask them nicely.

George McCulloch, “View of the City of Glasgow in 1853”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library]

This is the copy held by the Mitchell. The photo doesn’t really do it justice. It’s “double elephant” size, which means about 40 by 30 inches; it’s a bit battered; at some point some eejit has glued it to a bit of cardboard and torn it; but it’s still wonderful — especially when you zoom in.

To get our bearings: the viewpoint is somewhere above Tradeston, looking roughly north-east across the city centre. It’s an angle that emphasises the city’s industrial muscle, with the foundries of Lancefield and Anderston Quays in the foreground, steam and sail jostling on the Clyde, and the great chimney at St Rollox punching into the horizon. There’s a characteristic south-west wind catching the smoke from innumerable stacks, and an equally characteristic mixture of sun and cloud which allowed McCulloch to drape shadow over unappealing areas like Rottenrow.

To consider how the View came to be made, it’s helpful to zoom in on one small portion of the city, and to appreciate the fine detail with which it’s crammed.

Detail of Port Dundas from McCulloch’s “View”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library.]

Let’s choose Cowcaddens and Port Dundas, towards the top left of the View, because this was George McCulloch’s stamping ground. At the top, the Forth & Clyde Canal winds past Speirs Wharf, where the new Grain Mills (built in 1851 and still extant) are prominent. At the foot of the slope is another survivor, the Normal Seminary on New City Road; and not far away is its rival, the Free Church Normal Seminary on Cowcaddens Street.

The Caledonian Railway’s goods station is prominent to the right, roughly corresponding to the modern site of Glasgow Caledonian University. Along the line of the canal are various industrial sites, including the cones of the Glasgow Glass Works, and the wharf itself is crowded with masts.

Cowcaddens and Port Dundas on the OS six-inch map of 1864 (surveyed 1857). [National Library of Scotland]

This is the heart of one of Glasgow’s early industrial zones, built as an inland port on a spur from the “Great Canal” and which realised its potential when the Cut of Junction linked it to the Monkland Canal and hence the coalfields of North Lanarkshire. A few years later it would become home to Townsend’s Stalk, Glasgow’s tallest chimney and one of the world’s tallest free-standing structures; at the time of the View, Charles Tennant’s stalk at St Rollox was still unrivalled.

George McCulloch’s father, also George McCulloch, was a confectioner with a shop on Cowcaddens Street. At the time of the 1841 census he was living on Garscube Road with his wife Janet, their daughter Agnes, and sons George, James, and Robert. It was not an upmarket district; the Glasgow Tourist and Itinerary of 1850 described Cowcaddens Street as “a tortuous and squalid line”.

George junior was 14 at the time, and an apprentice lithographer. Lithography was a relatively new technology, invented in Germany in the 1790s, and it was having its boom period: from about the 1840s to the 1860s it dominated the printing of illustrations, technical diagrams, and maps. However, in January 1844, aged sixteen or seventeen, George also applied for and got permission to copy pictures in the Hunterian Museum. It’s a suggestive detail, which indicates that he already saw himself an aspiring artist rather than just a trainee printer.

George senior seems to have died about 1849; by 1851, George – now a lithographic draughtsman – and Robert (a seal engraver) were staying in a tenement at 32 Maitland Street. It’s not clear where George was working; the Post Office directory lists about forty lithographic printers in Glasgow, many clustered on Argyle Street. (One of George’s near-contemporaries, a couple of years younger, was working as a lithographer for Joseph Swan’s firm; his name was Thomas Annan, and a few years later he would set up in business as a photographer.)

Think about Glasgow as George, born about 1827, would have seen it. His was the first generation for whom it had always been a big industrial city, always growing, always expanding westward. He’d have walked through this cityscape every day to work, and across town to the Hunterian with his sketching kit, watching the place shuddering and spreading before his eyes.

The adverts don’t explain how McCulloch created the View. In a standard trope, the Glasgow Herald compared it to a balloon view, and imagined “many a chill and lonely vigil on attic windows and chimney tops”. Despite this flight of fancy it is fairly certain that no balloons were involved, or Kyle would have made a selling point of it: balloons were good publicity. Whether McCulloch did find his way up chimneys and into attics is harder to answer: he would certainly have had access to vistas of rooftops from vantage points such as the steps up to Speirs Wharf, and would surely have taken the opportunity for a few studies, but this can’t have given him all the raw material he needed.

It seems likely that McCulloch constructed his View in a fairly well-established manner. You start with a base map, and you use standard perspective techniques to project the plan as seen from the required viewpoint. You then wear out a lot of shoe leather walking the streets taking notes and sketches, and you use these to raise the elevations of the buildings along each street. It’s effectively how Google Earth constructs its simulated reality from map data and photos, but a lot slower; I’d guess there were months of work involved, and possibly weeks down in London where Kyle sent McCulloch to get the lithograph made.

Allan & Ferguson’s “Plan of Glasgow” (1847). [National Library of Scotland]

One remaining puzzle is what base map McCulloch used. The first detailed Ordnance Survey map of Glasgow wasn’t made until the mid-1850s, so he was probably working with something like Allan & Ferguson’s plan from 1847, which gives the street layout but doesn’t get down to individual buildings. All that detail must have come from observations, and it is extremely hard to catch McCulloch out about any of it.

Morison Kyle apparently made a profit on the View, because he now had McCulloch produce a follow-up: a tinted lithograph of the Cathedral. This wasn’t a random choice: the north-east tower of the Cathedral had been demolished in 1848, so there was a gap in the market for a souvenir showing it as it now appeared.

[Probably:] George McCulloch, “Glasgow Cathedral”, 1853. [The Glasgow Story]

I can’t find a copy anywhere that’s attributed to McCulloch, but Glasgow Museums hold a tinted lithograph of the Cathedral. It’s dated “c. 1830” but must be after 1848 because the tower has already gone. In the absence of other evidence, it seems likely that this is George McCulloch’s second published work.

After the Cathedral Kyle wanted more, but the law of diminishing returns was kicking in. The next effort, in 1854, was an imaginary portrait of Robert Burns — and that seems to have sunk without trace.

At this point, George McCulloch and his younger brother Robert moved to London. It was a natural move for an ambitious young artist, and George had evidently made connections during his earlier stay: he found a job with Day & Son, the printers of the View.

“The Volunteer”, lithographed by George McCulloch from a painting by J. Absolon, and published by Day & Son, 1860.

Unfortunately, the jobs that were available were basically hack work, and within a few years McCulloch was producing patriotic Victorian kitsch like the whiskery chap shown here with his porcelain girlfriend. By now, lithography was falling out of fashion, and coloured “chromolithographs” in particular were getting a justifiably poor reputation.

For the next thirty years, George McCulloch struggled by as a not very successful artist, lodging for most of that time in Bloomsbury. He married Martha Morgan Guttridge in 1872, and by the 1890s they were sharing a house in Hampstead with George’s nephew Douglas, her widowed sister Elizabeth, a young colleague of Douglas’s called Thomas Ellis, and a servant called Kate Ellis who may have been Thomas’s sister: a small but sprawling extended family subsisting on a patchwork of small incomes. George apparently earned a living with commercial jobs, and exhibited more serious work when he got the chance — in particular in the Dudley Gallery’s “black-and-white” exhibitions in the 1870s. He enjoyed occasional nice reviews, and seems to have been known by a handful of people who took lithographs seriously, but he never quite broke through.

William Merritt Chase, “James Abbott McNeill Whistler”, 1885. [Wikimedia Commons]

Then, towards the end of his life, George McCulloch had a brief flicker of fame. In 1897 he gave a talk about the artistic value of lithography to the Society of Arts. In the audience was one James McNeill Whistler: painter, lithographer, and notoriously the only person in London to best Oscar Wilde in conversation. Whistler was the first of the audience to respond, and there must have been an anxious moment for the speaker; but Whistler simply announced that McCulloch’s talk was so good that he had nothing to add.

That was more than just a welcome ego-boost, because McCulloch needed a powerful friend. He had recently been commissioned to make a mezzotint of somebody else’s portrait of a bishop. It turned out that Victorian London was not under-supplied with mezzotints of bishops, and when the print didn’t sell the dealer tried to claw back costs by saying it was substandard work and refusing to pay the £31 (about £4000 in modern terms) he owed McCulloch.

When the case came to court Whistler himself was in Paris, but he wrote in support and his friend and biographer Joseph Pennell turned up as an expert witness on McCulloch’s side. Pennell was an unpleasant piece of work, but he was also the expert on lithography. He went through the dealer and his “h’artist” like a dodgy curry, and McCulloch got his money plus costs.

So for a couple of years, finally, McCulloch was earning a touch of respect from some serious artists. It was about this time that he published his most widely circulated print, The Dreamers.

George McCulloch, “The Dreamers”. The Studio, 1898.

The Dreamers appeared in the journal The Studio, where Whistler also published. It’s perhaps not remarkable, especially compared with the spectacular View that had launched his career; but finally, more than fifty years after the teenage McCulloch had gone to copy paintings in the Hunterian, he was working in the great tradition of Western art and making pictures of lassies with nae clothes on.

He died three years later, but at least he got his moment in the sun.

To wrap up, let’s briefly consider the tradition of which McCulloch’s View is part.

Bird’s-eye views became common in Europe from about the sixteenth century, following the explosion of interest in systematic perspective. This was a strongly geometrical approach to art; by the late eighteenth century perspective was even being taught as a distinct quasi-mathematical discipline. The rise of ballooning also boosted interest in ways of showing landscapes, especially cities, from an aerial viewpoint, and it was also the time that panoramas — basically IMAX-style perspective paintings — developed.

John Bachmann sr, “New York and Brooklyn”, 1851. [Library of Congress]

As American cities expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, bird’s-eye views appeared, both charting their progress and advertising them to potential incomers and investors. One of the most striking is Bachmann’s view of New York and Brooklyn in 1851, with its gleefully busy river in the foreground; I suspect that McCulloch took his cue from this or something similar.

“A Balloon View of London”, published by Banks & Co, 1851.

The most famous bird’s-eye view from Britain in that period was the “Balloon View” produced for visitors to the Great Exhibition in 1851. It was a combination guide and souvenir, with street names marked; the perspective was not entirely systematic, but it gave the sense of immense detail that is much of the appeal of these views. Given the timing, it is plausibly what suggested the Glasgow View to Morison Kyle.

Thomas Sulman, “Bird’s Eye View of Glasgow”. Illustrated London News, 26 March 1864.

After McCulloch, of course, came Thomas Sulman’s view for the Illustrated London News in 1864. It’s a wonderful thing, but it also makes a strong contrast with McCulloch. It’s particularly noticeable how much Sulman widens the streets, and he takes an angle that makes the layout much more maplike; the overall effect is more like the 1851 London view than like McCulloch. (In fact, Sulman doesn’t really use a single viewpoint, as Will Knight’s work on a modern update illustrates.)

The other striking feature is how much more respectable Sulman’s Glasgow looks. There’s less smoke – even though Townsend’s Stalk is now breaking the skyline of Port Dundas and out-topping Tennant’s – and because of the angle you see much more of the Green and the West End. Compared to McCulloch it’s all just slightly middle-class.

H. W. Brewer, “Glasgow from the Necropolis”.The Graphic, 12 May 1888.

Bird’s-eye views faded out of fashion again towards the end of the century, but one interesting example deserves a mention. It’s part of a series made by H. W. Brewer for the Graphic magazine to coincide with the International Exhibition in 1888. Supposedly it’s a view from the Necropolis, but in fact Brewer plays with the perspective a lot, especially over to the left. It’s very much a composite, and there’s at least one church in the wrong place; I think at some point Brewer mucked up his base map, and presumably never popped back up the Necropolis to check.

H. W. Brewer, “Some English architecture of the last fifty years”. The Builder, 7 January 1893.

Another of Brewer’s works gives the technical game away. Published in The Builder, it’s an entirely imaginary cityscape representing “Some English architecture of the last fifty years”. The technique that McCulloch used to give us such a vivid and realistic picture could be used equally well to create a city that had never existed.

That makes a bridge to a famous twentieth-century bird’s-eye view.

The “inner core of the city” from the Bruce Report (1945). [The Glasgow Story]

This is the vision of future Glasgow from the Bruce Report in 1945. Like McCulloch, it’s an oblique aerial view north-east across the city centre. The viewpoint is higher than McCulloch’s, but there’s at least a distant family resemblance.

And of course the Bruce view is pure fantasy. McCulloch had taken a detailed street-level knowledge of the city and projected it into an imaginary perspective. The artist for the Bruce Report did the opposite: he takes an almost mathematical image of the perfect city, which would then be projected down to street level, flattening the existing landscape as it went. Mid-century planners, as James C. Scott points out in Seeing Like a State, loved these bird’s-eye views, because they made the mess of the city legible and then let you project that legible model back onto reality. It adds a slight question-mark to how we see McCulloch’s and Sulman’s works: magnificent in themselves and as documents of the city, but also a step towards the M8 and the high-rise schemes.

George McCulloch, “View of the City of Glasgow in 1853”. [Photo taken by permission of the Mitchell Library]

But let’s end on McCulloch’s View. Think of it as the sum of all those vivid details, all those “chill and lonely vigils”, spent not up a chimney somewhere, but tramping the streets in the cold and rain and endlessly sketching, endlessly absorbing the city.

And honour him by always zooming in.

Main sources

I’ve reconstructed McCulloch’s life largely from census returns and other official records, including his death certificate.

The scattered information about McCulloch’s London career comes from occasional newspaper reviews and passing references in texts such as Pennell’s Lithography and Lithographers (1915), though some of these seem doubtfully accurate. (A hazard of trying to trace our George McCulloch is that among the other contemporary Georges McCulloch of Glasgow was one who went to Australia and became a mining magnate and art collector, corresponding at one point with Whistler.)

McCulloch’s encounter with Whistler is recorded in a handful of letters held by the University of Glasgow and digitised as part of the Whistler Correspondence Project. I’m grateful to the University of Glasgow Archives for access to these, and the letter that gave the young McCulloch permission to use the Hunterian.

Most other sources are linked and/or credited in the text.

Finally, I’m indebted to a fellow collector of Glaswegiana, who would like to remain anonymous, for putting me on the trail of the View and sharing his other discoveries, to the Mitchell Library for giving me access to their battered but beautiful copy, and to Glasgow City Heritage Trust for letting me speak about it to an initially willing audience.

https://newcleckitdominie.wordpress.com/2023/11/16/many-a-chill-and-lonely-vigil-george-mccullochs-view-of-glasgow-in-1853/