Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Architect of the Glasgow Style.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art and furniture with high backs and straight lines. He worked with his wife Margaret Macdonald.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868, one of eleven children of a police superintendent. He was apprenticed to an architect while studying in the evenings at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1889 he joined the architectural firm Honeyman and Keppie. At the art school he became friends with Herbert MacNair and the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald. The group was called The Four and developed a style of its own with elongated figures and stylised plants.
In 1896 the firm won the competition for the new building of the Glasgow School of Art, designed by Mackintosh. It was built in two phases, 1897–99 and 1907–09, and became his masterpiece. The library in the west wing was hailed as one of the most remarkable rooms of the 20th century. The building was severely damaged by fires in 2014 and 2018, and its future is still under discussion.
Mackintosh also designed tea rooms for the businesswoman Kate Cranston in Glasgow, among them the Willow Tearooms of 1903, and the Hill House in Helensburgh of 1902–04, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. He designed complete ensembles in which architecture, furniture, lamps and textiles belonged together. His chairs with extremely high backs are known all over the world. The style unites Scottish baronial architecture with Japanese influences, straight lines, grids and stylised roses.
In 1900 he married Margaret Macdonald, and that same year the couple showed a room at the Vienna Secession exhibition, where they were greatly admired. In Scotland he received fewer and fewer commissions, and in 1914 the couple left Glasgow. During the war he was for a time suspected of being a spy. He then designed interiors for a house in Northampton and from the mid-1920s devoted himself to watercolours in the south of France.
Mackintosh died of cancer in London in 1928. He was almost forgotten at his death but was rediscovered after the Second World War. The Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow has a reconstruction of the couple's home. Today he is Scotland's best-known architect and an important forerunner of modernism.