Forsyth's

Robert Wallace Forsyth was born Haddington, East Lothian in 1843 the son of Alexander Forsyth (1804-1878).[2]

He moved to Glasgow in 1862 where he set up business selling socks, gloves and shirts on Renfield Street. Highly successful he acquired a group of buildings on the corner of Renfield Street and Gordon Street where, in 1897, he commissioned a bespoke department store designed by architect John James Burnet.[3]

The store was the first major store in Glasgow to have electric lighting throughout. It closed in 1983 and relocated to a building on Sauchiehall Street before closing altogether.[4]

In 1906 he expanded the business with a second major store in Edinburgh.

He died on 31 January 1937 and is buried in Craigton Cemetery in south-west Glasgow. He was married to Martha Sproull and they had thirteen children.[5]

The second building, erected as an Edinburgh flagship store in 1906–1907, was again designed by the Scottish architect John James Burnet.[6] An extension, designed by the architects Burnet, Son & Dick was built in 1925.

The facade is decorated with Neo-Baroque sculpture.[7] At the corner on a ledge above the third floor, and directly above the entrance doors, stands a figure of a woman who holds a sewing machine. Also at the corner, and forming part of windowed aedicules at the second floor, are flanking tympanum relief sculptures of a longhaired figure driving a quadriga with an F (for Forsyth) on the front of the chariot.[8] Running along an eaves gallery at the top of the building is a series - six on the Princes Street side, and four on the South St Andrews Street side - of term figures with fantastical heads by the Scottish sculptors William Birnie Rhind and William Reid Dick.[9] On top of the corner tower sits a gigantic partly gilded steel sculpture of armillary sphere decorated with the signs of the zodiac and with three dancing putti, designed by the English sculptor Gilbert Bayes.[10]

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  Figure driving a quadriga, Princes Street facade, Forsyth's
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  Term figure no. 3, Princes Street facade, Forsyth's
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  Term figure no. 4, Princes Street facade, Forsyth's
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  Term figure no. 5, Princes Street facade, Forsyth's
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  Sculpture of armillary sphere with zodiac and three putti, Forsyth's
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  Term figure no. 2, South St Andrew's Street façade, Forsyth's
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  Woman holding a sewing machine, Forsyth's, corner of Princes Street and South St. Andrew's Street