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Portrait of Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Architecture · Modernist

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

1868–1928 · Scottish

Glasgow Style — Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession

The defining figure of the Glasgow Style, who with his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and Herbert MacNair formed the group known as The Four. His buildings pair severe white interiors and attenuated black furniture with sinuous stylised roses and leaded glass, and were admired more in Vienna than at home. His architectural career effectively ended before he was fifty, and he spent his last years painting watercolours in the south of France.

How to spot them

  • ▸White rooms, black ladder-back chairs with absurdly high backs, stylised pink-and-green roses
  • ▸Tall narrow leaded windows, gridded panes, wrought-iron finials with bird and seed-pod motifs
  • ▸Quiz clue: 'The Four', 'Glasgow Style', 'Miss Cranston's tea rooms', 'Margaret Macdonald'
  • ▸Almost everything he built is in or near Glasgow

Key buildings

An art school on a steep Glasgow hill, its north studio windows vast and gridded, its library a cage of hanging timber posts — gutted by fire twice, in 2014 and 2018 (1899 and 1909)

Renfrew Street, Glasgow

The Mackintosh Building, won in competition in 1896 and built in two phases; its future remains unresolved

A harled grey house above the Clyde at Helensburgh, built for a publisher, now sheltered inside a chainmail box to dry it out (1904)

Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute

The Hill House, for the publisher Walter Blackie; the steel-mesh 'Box' was added by Carmody Groarke in 2019

A Sauchiehall Street tea room for a celebrated Glasgow restaurateur, with a mirrored, silver-and-white Salon de Luxe (1903)

Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

The Willow Tea Rooms for Catherine Cranston; 'Sauchiehall' contains the Scots for willow

A Glasgow board school of 1906 with two great glazed staircase towers like drums of glass (1906)

Scotland Street, Glasgow

Scotland Street School, now a museum of education

The only church he completed, in the north of Glasgow, with a squat buttressed tower modelled on one in Somerset (1899)

Maryhill Road, Glasgow

Queen's Cross Church, now the home of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society

A 1901 German competition entry for a connoisseur's villa, disqualified for missing drawings and finally built in a Glasgow park in the 1990s (1901 design, built 1989–96)

Bellahouston Park, Glasgow

Haus eines Kunstfreundes, for a competition run by the magazine Zeitschrift für Innendekoration

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Glasgow on 7 June 1868; apprenticed to John Hutchison, then joined Honeyman and Keppie in 1889
  • •The Four were Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald (whom he married in 1900), her sister Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair
  • •The Four exhibited at the Vienna Secession exhibition of 1900, where they were far better received than in Britain
  • •He said of his wife: 'Margaret has genius, I have only talent'
  • •Catherine 'Kate' Cranston commissioned four sets of Glasgow tea rooms from him, at Buchanan Street, Argyle Street, Ingram Street and Sauchiehall Street
  • •He left Glasgow in 1914, settling at Walberswick in Suffolk and later in London and at Port-Vendres in France, where he painted watercolours
  • •He died in London on 10 December 1928 of cancer of the tongue
  • •The Glasgow School of Art burned in May 2014 and again, far more severely, in June 2018 during the restoration; the school said in 2026 it could not fund a rebuild alone
  • •The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society, founded in 1973, is based at Queen's Cross Church

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources