Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in the East End of Glasgow in 1868. He lived and worked in the city for much of his life, and it was during his studies at the Glasgow School of Art that he met his wife, Margaret MacDonald.
The pair formed a close artistic collaboration and together with Margaret’s sister Frances, and her husband Herbert MacNair, became known as ‘The Four’. As was advocated at the school at the time, the group worked cross-disciplinarily, producing designs in many mediums, from furniture to textiles.
Mackintosh is best known for his astoundingly unique and innovative architectural style. Celebrated today as a leading pioneer of modernism, he developed a distinctive vernacular which absorbed traditional Scottish architecture, elements of modernist utilitarianism, and the understated, functional design of Japan, newly opened to the West. His designs, which also embraced natural forms, like his famous ‘rose’, as well as the mechanisation of the industrial revolution, influenced the Art Nouveau movement on the Continent. Here his work was met with great acclaim during the eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900.
Catherine Cranston's Commissions
Two commissions from the entrepeneur Catherine Cranston boosted Mackintosh’s early career. In 1896, he designed the interior of the Glasgow Buchanan Street Tea Rooms together with designer George Walton. Then in 1898 the pair were commissioned to furnish Miss Cranston’s new tearooms on Argyle Street, Glasgow. Here however their roles were reversed, with Mackintosh fully in charge of the furnishings whilst Walton was preoccupied with designing the interiors. Walton had just opened his new offices in London and his involvement with new projects there probably curtailed his capacity to design the furniture for Argyle Street. This second Cranston commission afforded Mackintosh a new freedom to experiment, whilst leading to further projects, including the Ingram Street Tea Rooms (1900) and the Willow Tea Rooms (1903). Miss Cranston, along with other small, private patrons remained important sources of income for Mackintosh throughout his career.
In 1903‑04, after working on the Willow Tearooms in Glasgow for Miss Cranston, Mackintosh was invited to redecorate and refurbish her home ‘Hous’hill’ (Hill House), on the city’s outskirts. At this time Mackintosh was in an innovative phase of creativity: experimenting with new materials, textures and forms, and how these contrasting elements could work coherently within a particular space. The ideas manifested at Hous’hill would inform future furniture designs and interiors, culminating in the commission for the second phase of The Glasgow School of Art in 1910.
Prior to his work on Hous’hill, many of Mackintosh’s interior schemes were white: elegant, white‑painted furniture curated in open white spaces, decorated with flashes of coloured glass or stencilled roses. Whilst white interiors were also employed at Hous’hill, in the Blue Bedroom the furniture was typically stained or waxed, thus visually breaking up an ordinary rectangular room. Stylised organic forms and Glasgow rose motifs were used sparingly; photographs and preliminary plans of the bedroom indicate that decoration of this kind was minimal and largely reserved for the stained glass on carefully positioned basket lamps.
Mackintosh's Journey in Walberswick
His success and productivity as an architect were short lived, with most of his high-profile commissions taking place over a mere ten-year period, between 1895-1906. In 1909 Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh’s business completed the Glasgow School of Art. By 1914 however, Mackintosh’s professional fortunes were dwindling and life in Glasgow becoming unbearably oppressive. The firm were receiving little work due to the recession gripping Glasgow. Mackintosh resigned as partner of the firm in December 1913, supposedly with the intention of setting up his own company, but sadly this never came to fruition. In June 1914, the Mackintoshes left Glasgow for a summer break in Walberswick, Suffolk. The uncertainty of the First World War and a rather unstable economic climate persuaded them to remain in the village for fifteen months.
Like a number of coastal villages across the UK, Walberswick became a hub of artistic creativity in the summer months. Bright blue skies, endless coastal cliffs and colourful fields as far as the horizon brought the likes of Philip Wilson Steer, E. A. Walton and Mary Newbery Sturrock to this charming fishing and boatyard community. Mary Newbery was the daughter of Frances Newbery, Headmaster of the Glasgow School of Art at the time Mackintosh designed its new premises. The two men had formed a very close friendship during their time in Glasgow. Mary was convalescing in Walberswick while the Mackintoshes were staying in the village, close to her family’s villa there. Every day they would venture over to her studio and it is thought that Mackintosh was encouraged by the Newberys to turn to painting during this time, in his search for solace and seclusion.
Over the next ten months or so, Mackintosh made over forty botanical watercolour studies using a variety of specimens: from wild plants such as willow catkins and kingcups, garden favourites fuchsias and petunia to local field and hedgerows species like sorrel and chicory. From 1901 Mackintosh had been sketching similar plants and flowers whilst on holiday within Britain, and further afield in Italy and Portugal. These earlier studies are more technical than the Walberswick works, with almost abstract backgrounds of alternating and overlapping perspectives of botanical cross-sections. The focus of these sketches was analytical: experimenting with the stylisation of plant forms to create abstract patterns on the page.
Mackintosh’s time spent studying the coastline and nature in and around Walberswick subsequently led to his arrest in 1915 when he was mistaken for a German spy. A thorough search of their home led to the discovery of their artistic endeavours in Germany and Austria. These revelations forced Charles and Margaret to leave the area with immediate effect.
Struggling to support themselves financially, the pair then moved to Port Vendres in the South of France, where his painting focused on the juxtaposition of natural coastal forms with manmade features. Illness forced Mackintosh’s return to Britain and he died in London at the age of 60. His legacy grew gradually in the decades after his death, and he is now a household name around the world.
