Charles Rennie Mackintosh(1868–1928)

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born at 70 Parson Street in the Townhead district of Glasgow on 7 June 1868, the fourth of eleven children of William McIntosh, a Glasgow police clerk, and Margaret Rennie. His father changed the family spelling of the surname to Mackintosh in 1893 to distinguish them from the Glaswegian McIntoshes; Charles took the Rennie of his mother's name as his middle name to set himself apart from the standard Mackintoshes too. He was a sickly child with a stunted right leg and a curvature of the spine, was kept out of school until eight, and spent the long Glasgow afternoons drawing the wildflowers of the Cowlairs Park behind the family tenement. He attended Allan Glen's School from 1877 to 1883 and at sixteen, against his father's preference for the civil service, was apprenticed to the Glasgow architect John Hutchison.

He moved in 1885 to evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, then under the directorship of Francis Newbery, the man who had pivoted the school from craft training into the Aesthetic Movement and who would become Mackintosh's most important early patron. He met Herbert MacNair, Margaret Macdonald and Frances Macdonald in the classes; the four worked together through the 1890s as The Four, exhibiting their drawings and posters at the Liège, Munich, Turin and Vienna salons that were the forming venues of the European Art Nouveau. He won the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship in 1890, spent the summer of 1891 drawing the Italian Renaissance buildings, and joined the Glasgow firm of Honeyman and Keppie as an architectural assistant in 1889, becoming a partner in 1901.

The competition for the new Glasgow School of Art building on Renfrew Street was announced in 1896; Mackintosh, twenty-eight, prepared the drawings for the Honeyman and Keppie submission. The design won. The first phase of the building was completed in December 1899. The second, west-wing phase, including the great two-storey library, was completed in 1909. The Glasgow School of Art is the most-cited single building in the architectural literature of the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright saw it in 1910 and called Mackintosh the most original architect in Europe. Le Corbusier's drawings of his 1908 visit are in the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. The school burned twice in the twenty-first century, in 2014 and 2018, and the rebuilding project is one of the largest single architectural conservation operations in the United Kingdom.

Through the same decade he produced the buildings that made the Mackintosh idiom a single coherent body of work: the Hill House at Helensburgh for the publisher Walter Blackie (1902 to 1904), the Willow Tearooms for Catherine Cranston in Sauchiehall Street (1903), Scotland Street School (1903 to 1906), and the House for an Art Lover (drawings 1901, built posthumously to his designs 1989 to 1996). He designed the furniture, the textiles, the wallpaper, the cutlery and the metalwork in each building himself, frequently in collaboration with his wife Margaret Macdonald, whom he married in 1900. The two of them ran a single creative practice; he later said that Margaret had genius and he had only talent.

The Glasgow architectural establishment of the 1910s did not understand him. The commissions dried up after 1909. He and Margaret moved to Walberswick in Suffolk in 1914, then to Chelsea in London in 1915, where he made the watercolour flower studies and the architectural drawings of the 1916 to 1923 period that are now among the most expensive single English watercolour sheets. He developed throat and tongue cancer in 1927 and died at a London nursing home on 10 December 1928, aged sixty. He was cremated and his ashes scattered. The Mackintosh name today carries his weight as the surname of the architect who, working from a Glasgow assistant's drawing board in the 1890s, became one of the small handful of figures in whom European architectural modernism turned. The Hill House, the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, and the Willow Tearooms are pilgrimage sites for architects from every country in the world.