Helen Hay was a highly skilled arts-and-crafts practitioner whose designs played an important role in creating The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895-96/7) and realizing its socio-political mission of revitalizing Edinburgh Old Town specifically, and Scottish culture more broadly, through the renewal of Celtic ornament and its applications (See General Introduction to The Evergreen). Despite her significant artistic contributions to the architecture of The Evergreen’s printed page and Edinburgh’s built environment, however, Helen Hay remains a largely unknown Scottish designer.

The historical record documents only a handful of biographical facts about Helen Hay. The daughter of Elizabeth Middleton Ross and William Hay, a farmer and bank accountant, Hay was born in Montrose in 1867 and died in Arbroath in 1955 (RA, “Helen Hay”). From the 1890s well into the twentieth century, Hay worked as a book artist, designer, metal-worker and painter-decorator in Edinburgh. According to Rosy Addison, Hay may also have exhibited watercolours with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and worked as a silversmith (RA, “Helen Hay”). These basic details about the artist’s life and career are augmented by scattered references to her in scholarly works on the Scottish arts-and-crafts movement (Bowe and Cumming), the painter John Duncan (Kemplay, Young) and the town planner and publisher Patrick Geddes (M. Macdonald). Further information about Hay’s artistic activities and contributions may be gleaned from manuscripts and printed ephemera in the Patrick Geddes Archives at the University of Strathclyde. The most significant source for studying Hay’s aesthetic achievement is The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, whose volumes offer a gallery of her Celtic-style ornaments, created as part of the Scottish Renascence promoted by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and his circle in Edinburgh Old Town at the fin de siècle.

The renewal of Celtic ornament was integral to Geddes’s plan to revitalize Edinburgh Old Town, and archival materials show that Helen Hay was central to realizing his vision as both a designer and a teacher. As part of his urban renewal project, Geddes purchased Ramsay Garden on Castle Hill in the early 1890s, renovating and decorating it for both private residences and university rooms (see General Introduction to The Evergreen and Kooistra, “Cosmopolitan,” 93-5). Geddes quickly established the Old Edinburgh School of Art (OESA; fl 1893-1897) on the Ramsay Garden premises, with the primary purpose of re-introducing Celtic ornament into local art and industry. He recruited Dundee artist John Duncan (1866-1945) as Director, and Duncan recruited “four ladies able and willing to work sympathetically” on local Celtic renewal projects. In fall 1895, Duncan told Geddes he had taught them “all I knew about ornament” and confirmed “that they are now thoroughly competent designers,” pointing to “the decorations of The Evergreen” as evidence of their skill (qtd in Kemplay 19).

Helen Hay joined Nellie (Helen) Baxter (1874-1952), Annie Mackie (1864-1934), and Annie Mason (dates unknown) in Duncan’s introductory class on Celtic Ornament, where she was clearly the star pupil. While Baxter, Mackie, and Mason did not contribute to The Evergreen until its second, Autumn number, Hay’s work was featured prominently in the magazine’s inaugural Spring volume. Moreover, Hay moved rapidly from the position of student to teacher in the School. Already by the winter of 1895—as the first issue of The Evergreen was being prepared for publication—Hay was assisting Duncan in teaching the Elementary Class in Celtic Ornament (OESA Brochure Jan. 1895). When the second number was published six months later, Helen Hay was the lead teacher of this foundational class, assisted by her colleague Nellie Baxter (OESA Brochure Oct. 1895). By the time the final issue of The Evergreen was in preparation in 1896, Helen Hay was an acknowledged expert in Celtic ornamentation. A special feature of the annual Edinburgh Summer Meeting in August of that year was Hay’s “Series of Demonstrations” in the art, which were advertised in the OEAS Exhibition Catalogue.

The lead teacher of the Elementary Class for multiple terms, Hay taught Celtic design and its applications to numerous local artisans. The course was aimed at “Workmen and Designers connected with all the various Crafts in which Celtic Ornament is at present (or might be more extensively) applied—e.g., those of the Printer and the Bookbinder; the Embroiderer, the Jeweller, Silversmith, and Brassworker; the Blacksmith, the Wood and Stone Carver, ＆ etc.” (OESA Brochure Oct. 1895). Hay also created designs for regional industries to use in the fabrication of textiles, moldings, ironwork, and other home decorations. As both teacher and designer, Hay’s influence on Edinburgh’s built environment must have been considerable, but her material legacy is now virtually untraceable. Her designs for the book arts are easier to recover. Patrick Geddes and Colleagues generally gave Hay authorial credit for her work, although the publishers who later repurposed her designs did not always do so. Hay contributed numerous page decorations to The Evergreen and designed bindings, endpapers, and title pages for books in the Celtic Library series edited by William Sharp (1855-1905). The former may be analyzed comparatively in the Evergreen Collection in the Yellow Nineties’ Database of Ornament.

Hay was one of the leading contributors to the murals Geddes commissioned for the public and private spaces at Ramsay Garden, providing ornamental tracery around the scenes painted by John Duncan and Charles H. Mackie (1862-1920). Although her decorative borders have not survived, contemporary critic Margaret Armour (who was also an Evergreen contributor) gives a glimpse into “the work of Miss Helen Hay” in “Mural Decoration in Scotland.” In this article for the International Studio about the Ramsay Garden murals, Armour includes an illustrative example of Hay’s borders and praises her ornamental knotwork for finding inspiration in the Book of Kells (100). Murdo Macdonald suggests that “a further indication of what these borders may have been like can be found in Helen Hay’s end-paper designs for the Celtic Library” (72), which likewise featured interlacing patterns.

As one of its main designers and teachers, Hay’s expertise in Celtic ornament was showcased in the School’s exhibitions. In the Exhibition Catalogue for Spring 1896, for example, Helen Hay’s name appears more often than that of any artist other than Duncan. Notably, Hay exhibited an impressive diversity of design types, attesting to her skill in multiple mediums (OEAS Exhibition Catalogue). The Exhibition was held at Ramsay Garden, so Hay’s work as a house decorator was on view in the Celtic tracery she painted around the murals in Geddes’s private residence and the University Hall Common Room. Working drawings for and examples of other forms of decoration included ornamental borders and lintels modelled in Denoline (a kind of gesso); grotesques for stair decoration; and designs for table cloths and curtains. A unique pattern for a metal screen in this Exhibition prefigures her future career. Hay advertised her services not only as a “Designer and Decorator,” but also specifically as an “Art Metal Worker” up to at least 1912 (RA, “Helen Hay”).

In the spring of 1896, however, Hay’s principal design work was for the titles Patrick Geddes and Colleagues published from their premises in the Outlook Tower, close to Ramsay Garden on Castle Hill. The 1896 OESA Exhibition included six book covers designed by Hay for the firm’s recently launched Celtic Library: The Sin Eater, by Fiona Macleod (aka William Sharp; 1895); Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry, edited by Elizabeth A. Sharp and William Sharp (1896); The Fiddler of Carne: A North Sea Winter’s Tale, by Ernest Rhys (1896); The Washer of the Ford: Legendary Moralities and Barbaric Tales, by Fiona Macleod (1896); The Poems of Ossian, translated by James Macpherson and introduced by William Sharp (1896); and The Shadow of Arvor: Legendary Romances and Folk Tales of Brittany, translated and retold by Edith Wingate Rinder (1896). With the exception of Rhys, these authors were all Evergreen contributors (see Introduction to The Evergreen, vol. 3).

Patrick Geddes and Colleagues conceived the Evergreen magazine and books in the Celtic Library as international vehicles of the local Scottish Renascence underway in Edinburgh (Kooistra, “Politics”106). Core to the collective’s vision was a shared belief in the power of the decorative arts to shape a better social and political future (Kooistra, “Cosmopolitan,” 94), and Helen Hay was central to this effort. Attesting to the importance of ornament to the larger project, the OESA Exhibition displayed the beautiful Celtic-style textual decorations—initial letters, headpieces, tailpieces, and Almanacs—that Hay designed for The Evergreen (OEAS Exhibition Catalogue), some of which were later repurposed for the Celtic Library.

Hay’s zoomorphic initial letter “T,” for example, has an interesting history in print culture (see Y90s Database of Ornament). A stunning interlacing of calligraphic letter and self-generating bird forms, Hay’s initial introduces “Proem,” the manifesto for the first Evergreen volume of Spring 1895. More than merely marginal decoration, Hay’s initial makes visible the essay’s argument that “in this time of Renascence” it was possible to glimpse, “against the background of Decadence, the vaguely growing lines of a picture of New-Birth” (Macdonald and Thomson 10-11). Hay’s initial was used again later in the same issue to introduce “The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt,” an important essay by folklorist Arthur Carmichael (1832-1912) aiming to bring together Scots and Gaelic culture (see Introduction to The Evergreen, vol. 1). As I elaborate elsewhere, the prominent position of this initial letter leverages Celtic ornament in the service of the movement’s vision for the future: “In this context, the bird inhabiting the remediated initial becomes a symbol for both the annual spring event of renewal in nature and the ongoing (re)generation of song in Celtic Life” (Kooistra, “Politics” 110). Notably, Hay’s initial letter “T” experienced a rebirth of its own. In 1897, after The Evergreen had published its last number (Winter 1896/97), Patrick Geddes and Colleagues repurposed it for the Celtic Library’s edition of T. W. Rolleston’s Deirdre (Rolleston 15). By the end of that year, Hay’s initial letter had migrated again, this time across the sea and into the Celtic Christmas supplement of The Irish Homestead. Its editor, T. Gill, hoped that this Scottish example “of modern Celtic design” would inspire a similar renewal in Ireland (Gill 26). Unfortunately, Gill did not identify the ornament’s designer; outside the pages of The Evergreen, Helen Hay’s name gradually became detached from her work.

Within The Evergreen itself, however, Helen Hay’s ornaments always received authorial credit, and scholars today are beginning to recognize her artistic impact on the magazine’s distinctive Celtic/modern “visual presentation.” As Clara Young observes, “Designs that were described as ‘after the manner of Celtic Ornament’ now appear to us to be totally infused with the international style of the moment—Art Nouveau” (74). Indeed, while Hay’s textual ornaments testify to her mastery of the mathematical intricacies of Celtic design, with its visual ambiguity, interlacing knotwork, and spiral forms, they are also notable for their artistic invention. In understanding Helen Hay’s artistic contributions, the importance of this originality cannot be over-emphasized. George Bain, author of the influential Celtic Art: Principles of Construction (1947), claimed that before his book, students of Celtic art merely copied existing ornaments (15). Bain makes no mention of the original designs Hay and her colleagues created for The Evergreen.

The seasonal Almanacs Helen Hay designed for the first three volumes of The Evergreen are also crucial to re-establishing her significance as a fin-de-siècle artist-designer. The Evergreen Almanacs are important for two reasons. First, from the perspective of feminist art history and its ongoing project of recuperation, the Almanacs represent the only full-page artwork by women in the Evergreen’s four volumes; although women designed the majority of the magazine’s textual ornaments, men contributed all the full-page images. Second, from the perspective of periodical studies, the Almanacs are a reader’s first landing page when they open The Evergreen. Serving as the ornamental introduction to each volume, the Almanac design provides a visual key to the named season’s physical and symbolic characteristics and functions as an interpretive guide to the ensuing contents. With each Almanac Hay developed greater powers of condensing the season’s attributes, transforming words from the volume’s “Biology” of the season essay into iconographic symbol. Hay created a patterned grid of the four astrological signs for the first Evergreen Almanac in Spring 1895. Her designs for the Fall (1895) and Summer (1896) Almanacs are more organic, relocating the zodiacal signs to the edge of each composition in order to develop complex patterns of seasonal motifs in bold black-and-white lines. With their striking disposition of positive and negative space and combination of curvilinear lines with geometric pattern, these Almanacs attest to Hay’s mastery of Celtic illumination for the modern age.

In his treatise on ornament, the late Tom Phillips observed: “The hiding of art in ornament has caused historians to search for women’s artistic achievements in the wrong areas, in the pictorial arts” (No. 87). Helen Hay’s textual ornaments for The Evergreen allow us to discover a new artistic world of visual play, where a gifted artist may be seen transforming, abstracting, and re-inventing Celtic ornament for fin-de-siècle print culture.

© 2024 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, FRSC, Emerita Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Digital Humanities, Toronto Metropolitan University

Selected Works by Helen Hay

• Almanac: Spring. The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 1, Spring 1895, p. 5. Evergreen Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, https://1890s.ca/egv1_hay_almanac/

• Almanac: Fall. The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 2, Fall 1895, p. 5. Evergreen Digital Edition, Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/egv2_almanac/

• Almanac: Summer. The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 3, Summer 1896, p. 5. Evergreen Digital Edition, Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/egv3_almanac-3/

• Initial Letter “T.” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 1, Spring 1895, p. 9 and p. 110. Database of Ornament, Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://ornament.library.torontomu.ca/files/show/7

• Initial Letter “T.” “The Banning of the Black Pig: A Folk Tale,” by Douglas Hyde, A Celtic Christmas, 1897, p. 4.

• Initial Letter “T.” Deirdre: The Feis Ceoil Prize Cantata, words by T. W. Rolleston. Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 1897, p. 15.

Selected Books Designed by Helen Hay for Patrick Geddes and Colleagues

• The Fiddler of Carne: A North Sea Winter’s Tale, by Ernest Rhys, 1896.

• Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry, edited by Elizabeth A. Sharp and William Sharp, 1896.

• The Poems of Ossian, translated by James Macpherson and introduced by William Sharp, 1896.

• The Shadow of Arvor: Legendary Romances and Folk Tales of Brittany, translated and retold by Edith Wingate Rinder, 1896.

• The Sin Eater, by Fiona Macleod,1895.

• The Washer of the Ford: Legendary Moralities and Barbaric Tales, by Fiona Macleod, 1896.

Works Cited

• Armour, Margaret. “Mural Decoration in Scotland. Part I.” The International Studio 1897, pp. 100-107. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Centre for Digital Humanities, Toronto Metropolitan University, https://1890s.ca/eg-review-the-international-studio-1897/

• Bain, George. Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction. Constable, 1996.

• Bowe, Nicola Gordon and Elizabeth Cumming. The Arts and Crafts Movement in Dublin and Edinburgh 1885-1925. Irish Academic Press, 1998.

• Carmichael, Alexander. “The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt.” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 1, Spring 1895, pp. 110-115. Evergreen Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2016-2018, Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/egv1_carmichael_lorne/

• Gill, T. P. Editorial. Celtic Christmas. Being the Christmas Number of the Irish Homestead, 1897.

• Kemplay, John. The Paintings of John Duncan: A Scottish Symbolist, Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994.

• Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “The Cosmopolitan Evergreen and the Global Digital.” Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp. 93-107.

• —. “The Politics of Ornament: Remediation and/in The Evergreen. English Studies in Canada, vol. 41, no. 1, March 2015, pp. 105-128.

• Macdonald, Murdo. “Celticism and Internationalism in the Circle of Patrick Geddes. Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 6, no. 2, 2005, pp. 69-83.

• Macdonald, W. and J. Arthur Thomson. “Proem.” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 1, Spring 1895, pp. 9-15. Evergreen Digital Edition, Yellow Nineties 2.0, https://1890s.ca/egv1_macdonald_thomson_proem/

• Phillips, Tom. The Nature of Ornament: A Summary Treatise. As presented by Tom Phillips to the Architecture Forum in the Reynolds Room of the Royal Academy of Arts on 28th October 2002, later published in the Architectural Review 1st April 2003.
  https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/publications/item/5311-the-nature-of-ornament-a-summary-treatise

• RA [Rosy Addison]. “Helen Hay.” The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, edited by Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, and Sîan Reynolds, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

• Young, Clara. “In Search of John Duncan,” The Artist and the Thinker: John Duncan and Patrick Geddes in Dundee, University of Dundee Museum, 2004.

Selected Resources relating to Helen Hay in the Patrick Geddes Archives, University of Strathclyde

• Old Edinburgh School of Art: Elementary Day Class on Celtic Ornament, Jan. 1895.

• Old Edinburgh School of Art: An Elementary Class of Celtic Ornament, Oct. 1895.

• Old Edinburgh School of Art Exhibition Catalogue, April 1896.