Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in 1868 in the Townhead area of Glasgow, the fourth of eleven children of a police superintendent. He showed early aptitude for drawing and was apprenticed to an architect at 16. He attended Glasgow School of Art in the evenings, where he met Herbert McNair and the Macdonald sisters, Frances and Margaret. The four of them would become known collectively as The Four, and their decorative work – elongated figures, abstracted natural forms, the integration of structure and ornament – defined what became known internationally as the Glasgow Style.
The School of Art building on Renfrew Street, which Mackintosh designed for the school where he had trained, was built in two phases: the east wing in 1897-99, the west wing and library in 1907-09. It is the building he is primarily known for and it is, by most assessments, one of the great works of British architecture. The library in particular – its projecting timber galleries, its columns, its integration of craft and structure – was considered extraordinary on completion and remains so.
The Glasgow Style and What It Was
The Glasgow Style was not, technically, Art Nouveau in the Continental sense. Mackintosh acknowledged his debt to Celtic and Japanese sources more readily than to Horta or Guimard. The rose motif that recurs throughout his work – the stylised form that appears in the Willow Tea Rooms, in his interior designs, in his furniture – was as much symbolic as decorative. Margaret Macdonald, who he married in 1900, was a significant creative collaborator; he acknowledged this openly, in an era when that was unusual.
The Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, commissioned by Catherine Cranston and designed in 1903, showed what Mackintosh could do when he controlled the total environment. Every element – the furniture, the lighting, the wall decorations, the metalwork on the exterior – was designed as part of a unified whole. The Room de Luxe upstairs, with its silver and purple colour scheme, its mirror frieze, its high-backed chairs, was among the most completely realised interior designs of its period anywhere in Europe.
The Decline
By the time the second phase of the School of Art was complete, Mackintosh’s career in Glasgow was effectively over. He had left the firm of Honeyman and Keppie in 1913 under circumstances that have been interpreted variously as creative frustration, professional marginalisation, and personal difficulties. He and Margaret moved to Suffolk, then to Chelsea. He produced watercolours in the South of France in the early 1920s – the flower studies in particular are among the finest things he made – but the architectural practice he attempted to re-establish in London never materialised.
He died in London in December 1928, aged 60, of tongue cancer. He had been living in a hotel. The level of recognition he received during his lifetime, particularly in Britain, bore no relation to the reputation that accumulated after his death. He was celebrated in Austria and Germany before he was properly celebrated at home.
The Fires
The School of Art building burned in May 2014, when a spark from a student projector ignited packing materials in the basement. The library and the west wing were heavily damaged. An ongoing restoration was nearly complete when the building burned again in June 2018, in a fire that was far more destructive. The cause of the second fire was a film projector used in an end-of-year show. Almost everything that had survived 2014 was destroyed. The restoration, if it proceeds, is now projected to cost over 100 million pounds and will take many more years.
The Willow Tea Rooms were restored and reopened in 2018, funded by lottery money. The Mackintosh House at the Hunterian Gallery reconstructs the interiors of his Glasgow home. His watercolours are in the Hunterian and in private collections. Glasgow has spent considerably more celebrating him dead than it ever managed while he was alive.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong? Send a correction.
