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William Birnie Rhind and Jenners Department Store

Yesterday I spotted a news item about Jenners department store in Edinburgh. The building, on a prime site on Princes Street, is currently run by Frasers Group PLC who hold the trading rights to the Jenners name but have decided to withdraw from leasing the site. This has sparked fears that, along with the immediate job losses, there may not be a department  store on the site for much longer, although the current owner of the building, Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, states that he intends to continue to lease the building for this use. This news caught my eye as William Birnie Rhind was responsible for the statuary on the current building which was officially opened in 1895. It is a good illustration of how he gained significant commissions for architectural as well as monumental sculpture during his working life.

Jenners, Princes Street, Edinburgh. Wikimedia Commons


The first incarnation of Jenners was opened in 1838 as Kennington and Jenner. It was established by Charles Kennington and Charles Jenner after they had been sacked from their jobs for taking an unauthorised day's leave to attend Musselburgh races! Charles Kennington died in 1872, after which time Jenner ran the business on his own account.

Although Jenner had retired in 1881, when the store was destroyed by fire in 1892, he set about working on creating a new building with the architect William Hamilton Beattie.  Ray McKenzie writes about the building in volume two of the Public Sculpture of Edinburgh and recognises it as one of the 'three great fin de siècle retail houses in Edinburgh that adopted the marketing ethos of the Parisian department store' (the others being Forsyth's and the Professional and Civil Service Supply Association).  Of these three Jenners was ‘not only the first to arrive, but also the most candidly indebted to the 'Belle Epoque' aesthetic associated with its Gallic origins'.  McKenzie describes the architectural and decorative excess of the building and notes that Beattie exploited ‘to the limit the stylistic license of late Victorian eclecticism’.

 Whilst there is no documentation McKenzie thinks it 'reasonable to assume that William Birnie Rhind was responsible for the design and modelling of the figures, with the carving of most, if not all of them shared among a small army of skilled assistants'. The original designs do not show any statuary but a sum of £8,000 had been set aside by Jenner for such additions. Later in his life, in a lecture given to the Edinburgh Architectural Association in 1908, Birnie Rhind criticized such tendencies for architectural sculpture to be an afterthought in building projects rather than part of the essential concept of a building. Whatever exasperation he might have felt at the late addition of the sculpture his input was significant. The sheer number of Rhind's figures (forty-eight in all) add to the sense of opulence inherent in the building and illustrate the range of Birnie Rhind's work. He was quite happy to be involved in this celebration of grandeur and elegance along with producing his morally loaded memorials to the military and war dead. The bulk of his statuary on Jenners store are female figures including Twelve Caryatids in National Costume and representational figures of The Four Seasons. Caryatids in architecture are female figures that also serve as supportive columns and Jenner's intention for their inclusion was 'to show symbolically that women were the support of the house as well as his business'.

William Birnie Rhind's Statuary on Jenners, Edinburgh.
Jacqueline Bannerjee 2010. 
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/beattie/2.html

                                                                                                 ***

Charles Jenner is recognized by many to be a man of many pursuits and influences. The evidence shows him to be a multi-faceted and cultured Victorian with interests in both the sciences and the arts. In 1864 he was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution and, in the following year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was a friend of Tennyson and his younger brother, William Jenner, was the Queen's physician. In contrast, it is interesting to note that the current, and soon be former, lessee of the Jenners building is House of Fraser, one of the interests of the enfant terrible of the retail sector, Mike Ashley. 

Sources

'(William) Hamilton Beattie (1842-1898)' <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/beattie/> [accessed 26 January 2021].

 'Jenner, Charles (1810–1893), Department Store Owner and Botanist', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/61300>

 'Jenners: Building's Owner Says Store "will Remain" despite Frasers Move', BBC News, 25 January 2021, section Edinburgh, Fife & East Scotland <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-55796806> [accessed 26 January 2021].

 Ray McKenzie (Raymond), Public Sculpture of Edinburgh, Public Sculpture of Britain, 21 (Liverpool: University Press, 2018).

Rhind, William Birnie, 'Sculpture as Applied to Architecture', Transactions of the Edinburgh Architectural Association, 15 January 1908, VI (1910), 54–64.


 Andrew Walmsley, January 2021

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/history/about/people/andrew-walmsley


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