Glasgow's Glorious Glass

Glasgow has always had a bad time with its own self image, a condition in no small measure due to its close proximity to the neo-classical grandeur of Edinburgh. Where its northern English industrial rivals took pride in the clatter, dirt, and noise from which their wealth was created, and celebrated it in fine paintings and the popular motto 'where there's muck there's brass', Glasgow's industrial moguls preferred to escape from reality into the romantic misty Highland landscapes of Horatio McCulloch or Landseer. Later generations of artists such as the famous 'Glasgow Boys' of the 1890s were Glasgow in origin hut not in subject matter preferring pastoral scenes in Scotland, France or Japan to the sooty verities of Gradgrind capitalism. Now that Glasgow has finally shed its pall of grit and grime, the citizens have awoken to the (for some shocking) realization that it is not only a fine city but, in spite of its social problems and vast soulless housing schemes, one of the greatest of nineteenth century cities, albeit a post- industrial one.