Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, watercolourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism and praised by great modernists such as Josef Hoffmann. He is among the most important figures of Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style).

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow on 7 June 1868, the fourth of eleven children and second son of William McIntosh, a superintendent and chief clerk of the City of Glasgow Police. He attended Reid's Public School and Allan Glen's Institution from 1880 to 1883. William's wife Margaret Mackintosh née 'Rennie' grew up in the Townhead and Dennistoun (Firpark Terrace) areas of Glasgow.

He changed the spelling of his name from 'McIntosh' to 'Mackintosh' for unknown reasons, as his father did before him, around 1893.

Mackintosh entered the architectural profession in 1884 as an apprentice to John Hutchinson in Glasgow and in the evenings studied at Glasgow School of Art where he became a prize-winning student. In 1889 he joined Honeyman and Keppie (John Honeyman and John Keppie), a major architectural practice as a draughtsman and designer, where in 1901 he became a partner.

Around 1892, Mackintosh met fellow artist Margaret Macdonald at the Glasgow School of Art. He and fellow student Herbert MacNair, also an apprentice at Honeyman and Keppie, were introduced to Margaret and her sister Frances MacDonald by the head of the Glasgow School of Art, Francis Henry Newbery, who saw similarities in their work. Margaret and Charles married on 22 August 1900. The couple had no children. MacNair and Frances also married the previous year. The group worked collaboratively and came to be known as "The Four [Fr]", and were prominent figures in Glasgow Style art and design. Mackintosh and Margaret married, setting up their first home in Mains Street on Blythswood Hill, the street later being renamed as Blythswood Street, Glasgow.

Mackintosh lived most of his life in the city of Glasgow, located on the banks of the River Clyde. During the Industrial Revolution the city had one of the greatest production centres of heavy engineering and shipbuilding in the world. As the city grew and prospered, a faster response to the high demand for consumer goods and arts was necessary. Industrialised, mass-produced items started to gain popularity. Along with the Industrial Revolution, Asian style and emerging modernist ideas also influenced Mackintosh's designs. When the Japanese isolationist regime softened, they opened themselves to globalisation resulting in notable Japanese influence around the world. Glasgow's link with the eastern country became particularly close with the shipyards at the River Clyde being exposed to Japanese navy and training engineers. Japanese design became more accessible and gained great popularity. In fact, it became so popular and so incessantly appropriated and reproduced by Western artists, that the Western world's fascination and preoccupation with Japanese art gave rise to the new term Japonisme or Japonism.

Later in life, disillusioned with architecture, Mackintosh worked largely as a watercolourist, painting numerous landscapes and flower studies (often in collaboration with Margaret, with whose style Mackintosh's own gradually converged). They moved to the Suffolk village of Walberswick in 1914. There Mackintosh was suspected of being a German spy and briefly arrested in 1915 during World War I.

By 1923, the Mackintoshes had moved to Port Vendres, a Mediterranean coastal town in southern France with a warm climate that was a comparably cheaper location in which to live. Mackintosh had entirely abandoned architecture and design and concentrated on watercolour painting. He was interested in the relationships between man-made and naturally occurring landscapes and created a large portfolio of architecture and landscape watercolour paintings. Many of his paintings depict Port Vendres, a small port near the Spanish border, and the landscapes of Roussillon. The local Charles Rennie Mackintosh Trail details his time in Port Vendres and shows the paintings and their locations. The couple remained in France for two years, before being forced to return to London in 1927 due to illness.

Mackintosh died of tongue cancer on 10th December 1928. His ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean from the rocks he'd previously painted in Port Vendres.