Margaret Macdonald
Artist of the Glasgow Style.
Margaret Macdonald made gesso panels, embroideries and paintings and worked with Mackintosh, who said she was the genius of the two.
Margaret Macdonald was born in 1864 in Tipton near Wolverhampton in England. The family moved to Glasgow around 1890, and she and her sister Frances enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art. The school's director, Francis Newbery, encouraged women students and introduced the sisters to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair.
Together the four formed the group known as The Four. Their early posters and watercolours with elongated, almost ghostly figures caused astonishment and were sometimes disparagingly called the Spook School. The sisters also ran a studio of their own, where they worked in beaten metal, embroidery and illustration.
Margaret married Mackintosh in 1900. She worked especially in gesso, a plaster-like compound that was modelled in relief and decorated with beads, string and paint. The gesso panel The May Queen of 1900 was made for one of Kate Cranston's tea rooms in Glasgow and is now in the city's museum collections. She contributed to the couple's interiors, such as the Hill House and the Willow Tearooms, and they showed joint rooms at exhibitions in Vienna and Turin. The panels The Seven Princesses were made for a music salon in Vienna and are now in the MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Mackintosh wrote in a letter that Margaret had genius while he himself had only talent. How much she contributed to the couple's joint work has long been debated. She died in London in 1933. In recent years scholars and exhibitions have presented her as an independent artist and a central figure of the Glasgow Style.