Mackintosh, Charles Rennie

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie (1868–1928). Scots architect, interior designer, and water-colourist, he worked mostly in and around Glasgow. In 1889 he joined Honeyman & Keppie and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1891 he travelled in Italy, and in the following year, with Margaret (1865–1933) and Frances (1874–1921) Macdonald and Herbert J. McNair (1868–1955), began to produce water-colours, posters, and artefacts. The friends became known as ‘The Four’, ‘The Mac Group’, the Glasgow School, or the ‘Spook School’ (the last because of the attenuated femme-fleur, long tendrils, rose-balls, and other slightly sinister elements that were an integral part of their Art Nouveau-inspired style). In 1897 they gained recognition in The Studio, which made their work known to the avant-garde in America, Austria, and Germany.

Mackintosh's first built work for Honeyman & Keppie seems to have been the tower of the Glasgow Herald Building, Mitchell Street, Glasgow (1893). This was followed by Queen Margaret's Medical College (1894–6) and the Martyrs' Public School (1895), both essentially traditionally constructed, but in a free style. Mackintosh began to draw on Scottish vernacular buildings for his inspiration, often looking to medieval tower-houses and fortified dwellings (which he misnamed Scottish Baronial) for his themes. His sources were not exclusively Scottish, however, and in later buildings his eclecticism ranged more widely. In essence, Mackintosh was an Arts-and-Crafts designer who used Art Nouveau decorative devices, but always employed traditional forms of construction of his native land.

In 1896 Honeyman & Keppie won the competition for the new Glasgow School of Art, but the design was Mackintosh's. The plan worked well, and the studios were lit by large north-facing windows, while the centrepiece had vernacular canted bay-windows derived from Dorset (or perhaps from Voysey's work), Art Nouveau elements, and an arched feature paraphrasing certain English Wrenaissance motifs. When the School was being built (1897–9), Mackintosh was commissioned to design fittings and decorations for Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms, and this was followed by Queen's Cross Church, Garscube Road (1897–1900), in a free Arts-and-Crafts Gothic style with touches of Art Nouveau. In 1899–1902 came his first important house, Windy Hill, Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, and some of his furniture designs were published in Dekorative Kunst (Decorative Art—1898 and 1899). In 1900 Mackintosh married Margaret Macdonald, and the couple decorated their apartment at 120 Mains (now Blythswood) Street, Glasgow, with white, elegant furniture and all fittings designed by themselves (now in the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow). Together, they participated in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna, where their work was well received, and they became friendly with Hoffmann and other Sezessionists. Indeed, in 1901 the Sezession journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) publicized Glasgow and Mackintosh, and the latter won a special prize for his Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art-Lover) in a competition organized in 1900 by Koch, publisher of Zeitschrift für Innen-Dekoration (Journal of Interior Design): this design (to which Margaret Macdonald contributed) was published (1902), and built at Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1902, having designed the Scottish section at the International Exhibition of Decorative Art in Turin, Mackintosh was commissioned to design The Hill House, Helensburgh, probably his finest achievement in domestic architecture. The exterior is completely harled (finished with a rough rendering), and beautiful interiors have panelled or stencilled walls: the white bedroom is one of Mackintosh's most felicitous creations. Then came the Willow Tea Rooms of Miss Cranston, the first of which (1903–19) was in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Mackintosh's domestic work was featured in Muthesius's Das Englische Haus (The English House—1904–5 and 1908–11), while Muthesius and other commentators wrote up Mackintosh's designs in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (German Art and Decoration) and Dekorative Kunst, all of which made his name and the Glasgow School widely known.

Perhaps influenced by the Germans and Austrians, Mackintosh began to adopt a more formal, angular geometry from around 1904, gradually discarding the curving lines of Art Nouveau. For example, his Scotland Street School, Glasgow (1904), was influenced by castle architecture, and is a symmetrical building with two conical-roofed staircase-towers flanking the stone front: the traditional arrangement is reversed, however, for the curtain-wall is solid, pierced by windows, and the towers are glazed. In 1906 it was decided to complete the Glasgow School of Art, and Mackintosh revised the original design for the west end, with tall vertical oriel windows perhaps suggested by Lutyens's Les-Bois-des-Moutiers (1898), while on the south side the windows were recessed, and a cantilevered conservatory was introduced, suggested, no doubt, by Scots bartizans. This western extension contains Mackintosh's library, where his angular style is eloquently exhibited in the galleried timber construction, suggesting an almost Japanese economy of means.

Mackintosh became a partner in the firm, probably in 1902, although this was not made public until 1904 when Honeyman, Keppie, & Mackintosh was established, but by 1909 his career as an architect was foundering, not least because his criticism of the profession alienated his colleagues. He was also suspect among English Arts-and-Crafts architects because his work was tainted with ‘decadent’ Art Nouveau, and because he does not appear to have been overly concerned with honesty or soundness in construction, and so offended purists who held to the views promoted by A. W. N. Pugin, William Morris, and others. He left the practice in 1913, and after a period in Walberswick, Suffolk (1914–15), the Mackintoshes settled in Chelsea, London.

In 1916 ‘CRM’ was commissioned by Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke (1877–1953) to alter and furnish his house at 78 Derngate, Northampton, which he did, introducing a repeated triangular motif suggested by trends in Viennese design. The guest bedroom (c.1919—now in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow), with its startling linear, striped, and black-white-ultramarine colour-scheme, was illustrated in The Ideal Home (1920), and had affinities with designs by Loos and Behrens. Some of the triangular stencilled patterns for Derngate may have been suggested by F. L. Wright's Dana House, Springfield, IL (1903), published in Berlin (1911). From 1914 Mackintosh had been producing exquisite drawings and watercolours, and from 1923 to 1927 concentrated on painting.

He has been proclaimed since the 1930s as a kind of proto-Modernist, but this does not stand up to serious examination. He had far more in common with fin-de-siècle Jugendstil and the Sezessionists in Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, and it was there that his work was best appreciated.

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