Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh combined Scottish tradition with the roses and straight lines of Art Nouveau. The Glasgow School of Art and the Hill House are his masterpieces, and his high-backed chairs became icons of the modern.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in 1868 in Glasgow, the son of a police superintendent. He was apprenticed to an architect while studying in the evenings at the Glasgow School of Art. There he met Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair, and the four formed the group The Four, working on posters, metalwork and furniture in a stylised, almost abstract manner. In 1900 Mackintosh married Margaret Macdonald, who became his close collaborator. In 1889 he joined the architectural firm of Honeyman and Keppie.

In 1896 the firm won the competition for a new building for the Glasgow School of Art, and Mackintosh designed it. It was built in two phases, 1897–1899 and 1907–1909, with large studio windows and a timber library. He designed the Hill House in Helensburgh for the publisher Walter Blackie and a series of tea rooms for Kate Cranston in Glasgow, where he and Margaret designed everything from furniture to cutlery. He exhibited in Vienna in 1900 and made a great impact there.

Mackintosh received fewer commissions in Scotland after 1910, and he moved to England and later to the south of France, where he devoted himself to watercolour painting. He died in London in 1928. During his lifetime his work was more appreciated in Vienna and on the Continent than at home, but today he is seen as Scotland’s best-known architect. The Glasgow School of Art was severely damaged by fires in 2014 and 2018. His furniture is still made.

• Glasgow School of Art
• The Hill House