167 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ, United Kingdom
Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ, United Kingdom
Glasgow School of Art
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, the artist's wife
Francis Henry Newbery
architect artist designer painter
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born on June 7, 1868, in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom to a big family of William and Margaret Mackintosh nee Rennie. His father worked as a superintendent and a chief clerk of the City of Glasgow Police. Charles was the second boy and had one brother named William Hugh and nine sisters.
Mackintosh spent his childhood in Townhead and Dennistoun areas of Glasgow, Scotland.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh entered the Allan Glen´s High School in 1877 and had studied there for seven years.
Later, he received some painting lessons from a local architect John Hutchinson and attended the night course of the Glasgow School of Art.
While at the institution, he had learned drawing, architecture and design under the School’s head, the painter Francis Newbery. Charles was a brilliant student and collected many prizes and competition awards, such as Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship (1890) which allowed the young artist to develop his skills in Italy and France.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh started his professional career at the firm Honeyman and Keppie which he joined in 1889. His debut project was the Glasgow Herald Building (currently The Lighthouse). Five years later, the artist became a partner of the company and his surname was added to its title.
Other major architectural work became the new building for the Glasgow School of Art in 1897 in which the artist successfully combined the elements of the traditional Scottish architecture and of Japanese art. This pioneer example of the Art Nouveau provided Mackintosh with great acclaim and made him known as the radical architect close to the modernist ideas.
While finishing the School, Mackintosh took up one of his mystifying projects, this one of the Queen's Cross Church in Maryhill, Glasgow.
In about 1900, along with his future wife Margaret MacDonald, her sister Frances MacDonald, and her husband Herbert MacNair he formed the group dubbed ‘The Four’, or ‘The Glasgow Four’ which represented the ‘Glasgow School’. The members of the association took part in various exhibitions together and individually, including the expositions in Glasgow, London, Budapest, Munich, Dresden, Venice, Moscow and Vienna.
The furnishings made by the group for the Seccession exhibition (1900) in this Austrian city impressed the audience so much that four friends obtained the status of true starts. This great success provided Mackintosh with a huge number of commissions from European patrons on furniture, private homes, commercial buildings and interior renovations. So, it was the real pick of Mackintosh’s architectural career and it had lasted from the middle 1890s till 1906.
Popular among the Austrians and Germans, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was however relatively known in his homeland. For example, the projects he had sent to the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901 were considered too innovative and not accepted to the competition.
In fact, many of Mackintosh’s brilliant ideas remained just ideas, like his Art Lover's House, Science and Art Museum, Railway Terminus or Alternative Concert Hall which were never constructed or constructed only after his death. Such projects include ‘An Artist's Cottage and Studio’ finished in 1992 or ‘Gate Lodge, Auchinbothie’ (1901), both realized at Farr near Inverness, Scotland.
Despite the architectural projects, Mackintosh as well designed interiors, textiles and metalwork helped in this activity by his wife.
Probably due to the decrease of the commissions in Glasgow or because of the crisis provoked by the outbreak of the First World War, the artist relocated to the Suffolk village of Walberswick by 1914 with his family. Since then, he abandoned the building construction and devoted himself to the watercolor paintings, in particular numerous landscapes and flower canvases which he planned to transform into textiles. Unfortunately, the idea failed. A lot of paintings were produced during his two-years stint in Port Vendres, France.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh spent his last days in London, United Kingdom.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a prolific and accomplished artist whose architectural projects contributed to the diffusion of the Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom and Europe at the turn of the century. The contemporaries of the artist baptized his style which brilliantly united classical architectural aspects with symbolism “Mackintoshism”.
Mackintosh had a massive impact on the style of the architects and designers who represented the Post Modern movement in the 1970 and 1980.
His Glasgow School of Art building, currently "The Mackintosh Building" is recognized by the critics as one of the finest buildings in the United Kingdom.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society promotes the heritage of the artist. The significant part of Mackintosh’s watercolors is preserved at the University of Glasgow.
The revival of the interest to Mackintosh’s art made from Glasgow the European City of Culture in 1990 which hosted a one-year festival with huge number of events dedicated to the artist.
Six years later, the big retrospective of Mackintosh’s artworks was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The portrait of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was featured on the £100 banknotes from the series issued by the Clydesdale Bank in 2009.
Three years later, the biggest collections of the masterpieces by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Four was purchased for £1.3m at the auction in Edinburgh.
Stained Glass window, The Hill House Glasgow
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for An Art Lover, Glasgow)
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
Music Room
The Scottish Musical Review
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for An Art Lover, Glasgow)
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for An Art Lover, Glasgow)
Cover Design
Chair Design
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
Chair Design
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
Dining Room
The Wassail
Sea Pink
Roses
Wall Panel for the Dug-Out (Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow) - left
Fetges
Mimosa
The Rue du Soleil, Port-Vendres
Venetian Palace, Blackshore on the Blyth
In Fairyland
Spurge With Yham
Willow Herb, Buxstead
Petunia, Walberswick
White tulips
Wall Panel for the Dug-Out (Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow) - right
Cintra
Fritillaria
The Descent Of Night
The Harvest Moon
Pine Cones
Pinks
Part Seen Part Imagined
Decoration of the Dining Room (House for an Art Lover, Glasgow)
The Little Bay, Port Vendres
Stork’s Bill, Holy Island
Cactus Flower
Jasmine
Fairies
Still Life of Anemones
Flowers
Bouleternère
Landscape
Quotations:
"Art is the Flower. Life is the Green Leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious more beautiful - more lasting than life itself."
"Life is the leaves which shape and nourish a plant, but art is the flower which embodies its meaning."
"You must offer the flowers of the art that is in you – the symbols of all that is noble – and beautiful – and inspiring – flowers that will often change a colourless leaf – into an established and thoughtful thing."
"You must be Independent, Independent, Independent – don't talk so much but do more – go your own way and let your neighbour go his... Shake off all the props – the props tradition and authority give you – and go alone – crawl – stumble – stagger – but go alone."
The initial spelling variant of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s surname was 'McIntosh'. The artist changed it in 1893 for unknown reasons.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh had a romantic relationship with the sister of the Honeyman & Keppie firm’s owner. Her name was Jessie Keppie.
But the next year, on August, the artist married one of his colleagues Margaret Macdonald whom he had met in 1892 at the Glasgow School of Art. The couple had no children.
