MACKINTOSH, Charles Rennie

This cabinet was made for Ms Rowat, Kingsborough Gardens, Glasgow. The feminine colouring of the interior betrays the influence of Ms Rowat, the lady of the house, who made a major role in the redecorating process.

The silvered panels are decorated with mosaic glass. The uniqueness and fascination of Scottish Art Nouveau lie in the coupling of almost mannered figurines with the non-representalism of its architectural and furniture design.

This model was created in 1897 for Catherine Cranston’s Tea Rooms at 114 Argyle Street, Glasgow. It was realised by Francis Smith and Son, cabinetmakers and upholsterers in Glasgow.

This model - still a famous piece of furniture today - contributes to the overall design of the room with its high back. Although the chairs Mackintosh designed for the Argyle Street Tea Rooms are obviously in keeping with the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement and bear the influence of Voysey, they also display all the characteristics of Mackintosh’s individual style.

Grouped around dining tables, the elongated chairs created an intimate conversational space, and the dark oval headrests served to frame the broad fashionable hats of female tea drinkers. In 1900 the chair was one of several tearoom designs that Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald incorporated in their first home as a married couple and was also exhibited in their installation at the Vienna Secession. These contexts challenged the conventional separation of public and private and of masculine and feminine spheres of influence.

The case of the clock is of oak, with a veneer of black stencilled chequer-board decoration. The face is made up of squares of mother-of-pearl with four squares of ivory at the corners; the numbers are of wood, inset into the face, and the hands are metal painted blue. At the back are two doors, to the clock above and the pendulum below; the movement is French late nineteenth century. Above the 12 on the dial is a small brass crescent to adjust the speed of the movement.

The clock was designed for the guest bedroom of Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke’s house at 78 Derngate, Northampton. Mackintosh’s transformation of a nineteenth-century terraced house in Northampton for the engineering-model manufacturer Bassett-Lowke was his last major commission in Northampton.

The guest bedroom at Derngate was designed in 1919; Bassett-Lowke described it as ‘perhaps the most daring in the house’, with its striking black-and-white striped wallpaper carried up onto the ceiling. There were matching curtains and bedspread, and the furniture was edged with blue and black chequerboard decoration.

This was the largest clock designed by Mackintosh for Bassett-Lowke (designs for several others are in the University of Glasgow Mackintosh Collection).

Mackintosh was commissioned to design furniture and fittings for Miss Cranston’s tearooms in Glasgow.

The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, which opened in 1981, holds the Mackintosh estate of drawings, watercolours and archival material as well as a collection of his furniture.

Windy Hill or Windyhill is a house designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and furnished by him and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, in Kilmacolm. It remains as a home in private ownership.

The house was commissioned in 1900 by William Davidson, a provisions merchant, who was Mackintosh’s friend and patron. Mackintosh not only designed the Art Nouveau-style house but also, with Macdonald, its decor, furniture and fittings, including fireplaces, panelling, stained glass and lights. They also designed the 2 acres garden. The house was completed and occupied in 1901.

The exterior was brought back to how it would have looked in 1903.

Designed between 1903 and 1906, Scotland Street School was Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s last major commission in Glasgow, displaying the mature architect’s genius to perfection. A functioning school until 1979, the building now houses a museum of the history of Scottish education and a gallery of contemporary artworks about that history.

In the twin stair towers of Scotland Street School, Mackintosh left a void between the curved outer screen of glass and the staircase, two elements that were later united by Walter Gropius in the Fagus Factory (1911), Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany. At Scotland Street, the separation permits an uninterrupted upward view through each tower to the traditional carpentry supporting the conical roof. The towers and the tall ranges of windows between them have their sources in the 16th-century Falkland Palace, Fife, which Mackintosh sketched (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).

In 1895, a limited competition had been announced for the design of a building to house the Glasgow School of Art. As the cost limit would not pay for the entire building, it had been decided to proceed with the construction in two phases. The first stage, beginning in 1896, was the eastern half to just beyond the entrance; this was followed ten years later by the western portion. The Glasgow School of Art, therefore, demonstrates Mackintosh’s organic planning whereby within a fixed frame elements are synthesized in response to changing design criteria.

The school’s site, a steep bluff falling from north to south, gives a huge increase in height between the entrance elevation on the north and the rear elevation to the south. The difference is not just one of scale because each fa�ade, being the revelation of inner functions, has an individual identity. On the north, with its banks of studios, the rhythmic sequence of metal-framed windows appears at a casual glance to be symmetrical, an illusion fostered by the equal lengths of railings flanking the entrance. Composed of small units indicating lesser volumes within, the elevation is marked out by an oriel window and seemingly off-centre doorway.

The Glasgow School of Art building is one of Mackintosh’s most famous architectural creations. There was a national and international outpouring of grief when it was devastated by fire in 2014, and its magnificent library was completely destroyed. However, when it was first unveiled in 1899, the half-finished building was deeply unpopular and appeared to lack symmetry and logic.

The photo, taken before the 2014 fire, shows the north fa�ade of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art.

In 1902, Mackintosh received another significant commission when he was asked to design The Hill House in Helensburgh by Walter Blackie, director of the well-known Glasgow publishers. Walter Blackie commissioned not only the house and garden but much of the furniture and all the interior fittings and decorative schemes.

Hill House was a family home with a difference. On the outside, the house had solid massed forms with little ornamentation. Inside, the rooms exuded light and space, and the use of colour and decoration was all part of Mackintosh’s uncompromising vision.

The Hill House is now in the care of The National Trust for Scotland. The original furniture, fittings and interior designs have been reinstated or restored.

The photo shows a detail of the south fa�ade.

In 1902, Mackintosh received another significant commission when he was asked to design The Hill House in Helensburgh by Walter Blackie, director of the well-known Glasgow publishers. Walter Blackie commissioned not only the house and garden but much of the furniture and all the interior fittings and decorative schemes.

Hill House was a family home with a difference. On the outside, the house had solid massed forms with little ornamentation. Inside, the rooms exuded light and space, and the use of colour and decoration was all part of Mackintosh’s uncompromising vision.

The Hill House is now in the care of The National Trust for Scotland. The original furniture, fittings and interior designs have been reinstated or restored.

In 1902, Mackintosh received another significant commission when he was asked to design The Hill House in Helensburgh by Walter Blackie, director of the well-known Glasgow publishers. Walter Blackie commissioned not only the house and garden but much of the furniture and all the interior fittings and decorative schemes.

Hill House was a family home with a difference. On the outside, the house had solid massed forms with little ornamentation. Inside, the rooms exuded light and space, and the use of colour and decoration was all part of Mackintosh’s uncompromising vision.

The Hill House is now in the care of The National Trust for Scotland. The original furniture, fittings and interior designs have been reinstated or restored.

Designed between 1903 and 1906, Scotland Street School was Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s last major commission in Glasgow, displaying the mature architect’s genius to perfection. A functioning school until 1979, the building now houses a museum of the history of Scottish education and a gallery of contemporary artworks about that history.

In the twin stair towers of Scotland Street School, Mackintosh left a void between the curved outer screen of glass and the staircase, two elements that were later united by Walter Gropius in the Fagus Factory (1911), Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany. At Scotland Street, the separation permits an uninterrupted upward view through each tower to the traditional carpentry supporting the conical roof. The towers and the tall ranges of windows between them have their sources in the 16th-century Falkland Palace, Fife, which Mackintosh sketched (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).

In 1900, Mackintosh was commissioned to build Windyhill for William Davidson, a large-scale provisions merchant, who became one of Mackintosh’s lifelong patrons and supporters. Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret, had complete control over the project at Windyhill. They designed furniture, fireplaces, panelling, stained glass, light fixtures and decorative schemes. What sets the property apart from his other commercial projects is that it has been designed on the strong traditions of Scottish architecture, including an L-shaped plan, harled exterior, unadorned window openings, steeply-pitched slate roofs and chimneys at the gable ends.

In 1902, Mackintosh received another significant commission when he was asked to design The Hill House in Helensburgh by Walter Blackie, director of the well-known Glasgow publishers. Walter Blackie commissioned not only the house and garden but much of the furniture and all the interior fittings and decorative schemes.

Hill House was a family home with a difference. On the outside, the house had solid massed forms with little ornamentation. Inside, the rooms exuded light and space, and the use of colour and decoration was all part of Mackintosh’s uncompromising vision.

The Hill House is now in the care of The National Trust for Scotland. The original furniture, fittings and interior designs have been reinstated or restored.

Although Mackintosh created this chair of elegant style in 1898-99 for Catherine Cranston’s Argyle Street tea rooms in Glasgow city centre, he also used the design in the dining room of his own home. It was the first of many of his high-back chair designs.

Mackintosh had a lifelong interest in nature, and this greatly influenced a lot of his earlier work. The oval headpiece of the chair has been pierced with a silhouette that can be read as a flying bird, a motif used in the Argyle Street tea rooms.

Although the design of the chair looks simple, it has actually been built with a combination of different geometric shapes fitted together like a jigsaw. The curves in the oval headpiece neatly slot into the back posts, which are rectangular at the bottom, but gradually taper off into a circular form as they reach the top.

The seat has horsehair upholstery.

This chair is one of Mackintosh’s most famous pieces of furniture. Made from ash wood, it is characterised by the emblematic and iconic, extremely high openwork back with striped and checkerboard patterns. The slim and elusive silhouette of the chair enhances its volume.

The photo shows the front salon in the recreated Willow Tea Rooms.

The best-known Mackintosh interiors were those created for Miss Catherine Cranston’s four Tea-Rooms in Glasgow: Buchanan Street (1896), Argyle Street (1897), Ingram Street (1900) and the Willow (1903), of which only the last-mentioned survives at 217 Sauchiehall Street. At this time, tea-rooms in the city were numerous and popular; when hung with paintings by the Glasgow Boys some of them became almost like art galleries. None could match the tea rooms of Miss Cranston with their startling decorations and the provision of such amenities as billiard rooms and ladies’ rooms.

The Buchanan Street tea-room was created behind an earlier neo-Flemish fa�ade under the direction of the Glasgow designer George Walton. Mackintosh’s contribution included mural decorations, the most striking of which was a frieze of stencilled women whose silhouettes, stiff and hieratic like Byzantine saints, were entwined with briars. The roles of Walton and Mackintosh were reversed in 1897 in the Argyle Street tea-room, for which Mackintosh designed the furniture; in 1906, he added a basement, the Dutch Kitchen. The fireplace is framed by the swooping curves of a screen beyond which the wall is cross-hatched.

In furniture, as in other areas of design, it seems that there was an early affinity of approach and method between Mackintosh and MacNair; initially, at least, the latter may have led the way, although, in time, Mackintosh’s architectural discipline provided a more structural rationale. His early individual pieces of furniture made much use of dark or green-stained oak and often incorporated beaten metal figurative panels. With the commissions for the tea-rooms, Mackintosh could extend his repertory and experiment further by using the chairs to complement the interior decoration while defining a particular location. In the Dutch Kitchen, high-backed chairs were set in the inglenook; elsewhere the low Windsor chairs were a foil to the elaborate decorations on walls and piers.

In the Willow Tea Rooms, Mackintosh had total control of the project both inside and outside; his wife contributed some of the decorative motifs. On the ground floor, he set up an unpainted frieze of plaster panels, their angular outlines leading the eye deeper into the stems and branches of the willow wood. Above, in the Room de Luxe, a leaded-glass frieze with pink and green insets was placed against white painted walls, and on the curved bay, leaf-shaped mirror glass shimmered like the stirring of willow leaves. In the Room de Luxe, the chairs, of two sizes, are silver with purple upholstery; the tops of the higher chairs are pierced by a grid of squares, a favourite Mackintosh device.

Glasgow School of Art’s library was considered one of the finest rooms in Britain before the fire that destroyed it 2014.

The library of the Glasgow School of Art is one of Mackintosh’s masterpieces. Whereas elsewhere in the school white interiors give spatial clarity and an exactness of definition, the wood-lined interior of the library is ambiguous despite its rigid geometry. On four sides a narrow gallery is supported by thin beams that project beyond the gallery front to engage the sides of eight free-standing posts. Set in two rows these posts define an inner zone, free of structural interruption, which houses a cluster of lamps with metal shades, like miniature black and silver skyscrapers, inset with pink and purple glass.

In the twin stair towers of Scotland Street School Mackintosh left a void between the curved outer screen of glass and the staircase, two elements that were later united by Walter Gropius in the Fagus Factory (1911), Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany. At Scotland Street the separation permits an uninterrupted upward view through each tower to the traditional carpentry supporting the conical roof. The towers and the tall ranges of windows between them have their sources in the 16th-century Falkland Palace, Fife, which Mackintosh sketched (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).

Substantial on the outside and beautifully delicate on the inside, Pamela Robertson, senior curator at the Hunterian art gallery and museum in Glasgow, describes the house as ‘Mackintosh’s first essay into the room as a work of art.’ Charles Rennie Mackintosh is best known for his design of commercial buildings in Glasgow, including The Herald Building and the Glasgow School of Art. However, Windyhill is one of the most important examples of his work.

Along with the Industrial Revolution, Mackintosh was influenced by Asian style and emerging modernist ideas, making him a leading figure worldwide for the Art Nouveau movement. While working in architecture, Charles Rennie Mackintosh developed his own style: a contrast between strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs, many of which can be seen at Windyhill. Mackintosh’s wife, Margaret, worked alongside him, being instrumental in many of the furniture designs and decorative elements.

78 Derngate was Mackintosh’s final major commission; his visionary patron was W.J Bassett-Lowke, a Northampton model engineer. It is the only place where Mackintosh’s mature architectural and interior style can be seen in its original setting.

It is a tragedy that Mackintosh’s personal situation, alcoholism, and unfortunate financial circumstances heavily influenced his work. One of the few building projects carried out during his London period illustrates that it was neither lack of genius nor waning architectural creativity which caused him to concentrate his output on textile design. He demonstrated his usual excellence in the remodelling of a Victorian terraced house in Northampton for Basset-Lowke, a member of the Design and Industries Association. The sensational geometric designs of the fa�ade and the interior are today considered to be the first examples of Modern Style architecture in Britain.

The house has been meticulously restored and opened to the public.

78 Derngate was Mackintosh’s final major commission; his visionary patron was W.J Bassett-Lowke, a Northampton model engineer. It is the only place where Mackintosh’s mature architectural and interior style can be seen in its original setting.

It is a tragedy that Mackintosh’s personal situation, alcoholism, and unfortunate financial circumstances heavily influenced his work. One of the few building projects carried out during his London period illustrates that it was neither lack of genius nor waning architectural creativity which caused him to concentrate his output on textile design. He demonstrated his usual excellence in the remodelling of a Victorian terraced house in Northampton for Basset-Lowke, a member of the Design and Industries Association. The sensational geometric designs of the fa�ade and the interior are today considered to be the first examples of Modern Style architecture in Britain.

The house has been meticulously restored and opened to the public.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of the most influential figures of Art Nouveau, as he developed his original, incomparable and linear style in architecture and decorative arts. He finely exploited natural and artificial lighting and explored new spatial concepts; he adapted the traditional Scottish elements to the modern way of life. He treated his buildings as whole works of art, carefully designing every detail into clear and pure lines.

His elegant decorative interiors complemented his wooden furniture, designed with minimal decorations, such as brass fittings or leaded glazed glass panels, often enriched by a typical recurrent motif, the stylized rose, also known as the “Glasgow rose”.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of the most influential figures of Art Nouveau, as he developed his original, incomparable and linear style in architecture and decorative arts. He finely exploited natural and artificial lighting and explored new spatial concepts based on strong traditional Scottish elements adapted to the modern way of life. He treated his buildings as whole works of art, with every detail carefully designed into clear and pure lines.

The photo shows the family room at Hill House, which is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

Within the building’s solid and protective walls, there are two essential moods to the house. There is the calming quiet of the hallway and the upstairs landing, with their dark wood panelling, a theme taken up again only in the painted, panelled dining room. Then there is the open, airy, light-filled drawing room and bedrooms, where white and off-white surfaces serve as a canvas on which the two Mackintoshes served an array of colour, symbolism and minimalist ornament. This is a house that could be emptied of hanging paintings or sculptures and yet still be replete with design. Skirting, doors, lights and furniture - and almost anything else that served a function, cutlery included - all were husbanded and midwifed into the world by the two Mackintoshes.

The photo shows the fireplace at Hill House.

Within the building’s solid and protective walls, there are two essential moods to the house. There is the calming quiet of the hallway and the upstairs landing, with their dark wood panelling, a theme taken up again only in the painted, panelled dining room. Then there is the open, airy, light-filled drawing room and bedrooms, where white and off-white surfaces serve as a canvas on which the two Mackintoshes served an array of colour, symbolism and minimalist ornament. This is a house that could be emptied of hanging paintings or sculptures and yet still be replete with design. Skirting, doors, lights and furniture - and almost anything else that served a function, cutlery included - all were husbanded and midwifed into the world by the two Mackintoshes.

The photo shows the fireplace at Hill House.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of the most influential figures of Art Nouveau, as he developed his original, incomparable and linear style in architecture and decorative arts. He finely exploited natural and artificial lighting and explored new spatial concepts; he adapted the traditional Scottish elements to the modern way of life. He treated his buildings as whole works of art, carefully designing every detail into clear and pure lines.

His elegant decorative interiors complemented his wooden furniture, designed with minimal decorations, such as brass fittings or leaded glazed glass panels, often enriched by a typical recurrent motif, the stylized rose, also known as the “Glasgow rose”.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of the most influential figures of Art Nouveau, as he developed his original, incomparable and linear style in architecture and decorative arts. He finely exploited natural and artificial lighting and explored new spatial concepts based on strong traditional Scottish elements adapted to the modern way of life. He treated his buildings as whole works of art, with every detail carefully designed into clear and pure lines.

The photo shows the main bedroom at Hill House, which is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh is one of the most influential figures of Art Nouveau, as he developed his original, incomparable and linear style in architecture and decorative arts. He finely exploited natural and artificial lighting and explored new spatial concepts based on strong traditional Scottish elements adapted to the modern way of life. He treated his buildings as whole works of art, with every detail carefully designed into clear and pure lines.

The photo shows the main bedroom at Hill House, which is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.

In 1923 Mackintosh and his wife Margaret went to Port Vendres, a French Mediterranean village on the Spanish border, where he devoted his time to painting watercolours. As painting was an activity to which he had always dreamed to devote his life, he was very happy to do so.

The immediate vicinity of Port Vendres offered a diverse range of subjects, from the bustle of the quayside with its cranes and ships to the distant perspectives of mountain villages. In this varied landscape, baked by the summer heat, Mackintosh became so obsessed with the integrity and strength of structural form that village houses began to replicate rock formations. In these late works, the relentless Mediterranean light suffuses the delicate watercolours, with their bright orange and blue splotches of roofs and water, reducing countryside and rocky slopes to flat, clearly defined planes without the distortion of shading. Buildings and landscape, having the same purity of form, are united in an overall pattern like a Mackintosh textile design.

Mackintosh’s painting of Palalda, the mediaeval hill-town which is now part of Am�lie, clearly shows his delight in the jumble of architecture. In it, he combines two different viewpoints. The upper part of the picture seems to have been painted from beside the north side of the river, while the lower part is a view from the south side. He altered the lower part of this painting by cutting a piece of paper to the shape of the houses he wanted to retain and sticking it over the part which he did not like.

On becoming ill in 1927, Mackintosh left France for treatment in London, where he died the next year.

Although Mackintosh had no formal training in the design of lithographic posters, in the mid-1890s, he produced several, including this design for The Scottish Musical Review, printed in four sections. Human, plant, and bird forms are integrated into abstract patterns illustrating Symbolist themes of spiritual transformation, decay and renewal, day and night. The unconventional stylization of the androgynous figure owed much to the experimental approach that Mackintosh shared with the rest of the Glasgow group known as the Four, comprising his wife, Margaret Macdonald; her sister, Frances Macdonald; and Frances’s husband, Herbert MacNair. The analogy with music - a model of synthetic unity - was a major theme in critical writing about the New Art.

This towering poster, with its androgynous stylization of the female form, idiosyncratic lettering, and purple and green colour scheme - perhaps symbolic of both the Scottish landscape and the women’s suffrage movement in which many Glasgow artists were involved at the time - was part of an experimental series produced collaboratively in the mid–1890s by The Four (Mackintosh, the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald, and Herbert McNair). The ornamental language they developed - particularly the visualization of the New Woman - was criticized as being “ghoul-like” and “weird.”

Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald left Glasgow to settle temporarily in Walberswick, Suffolk, from August 1914 to early summer 1915. He intended to rest from the stress in Glasgow and focus on his painting, but flower drawing assumed a dominant role in his work, and he made over forty superbly elegant studies of plants.

The present watercolour depicts two flowers: Anemone and Pasque Walberswick. The inscription on the verso reads: “Anemone/by C.R and Margaret/Mackintosh (1915).

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an influential architect and designer who attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1883-94. He was also a very competent artist and produced over 200 paintings throughout his career, chiefly flower studies and landscapes, but nearly all were executed in watercolour. This painting (one of a pair) is unique in that it was painted in oils and, rather than painting directly onto the wall itself, Mackintosh applied the design to a free-standing canvas hanging.

The canvas relates to smaller watercolours in The Hunterian collection, formerly thought to be textile designs, and to their painted canvas, ‘The Little Hills’ by Margaret Macdonald. It is likely that they were intended for ‘The Dug-Out’, though it is not known whether they were ever installed there.

The canvas was lost in the fire in The Mackintosh Building at The Glasgow School of Art on 23rd May 2014.

Mackintosh designed this washstand as part of the furnishings for the Blue Bedroom in Hous’hill, an eighteenth-century residence in a suburb of Glasgow he remodelled for Kate Cranston (Mrs Cochrane) and her husband. Miss Cranston, one of Mackintosh’s most important clients, was the proprietress of a group of highly successful tearooms in Glasgow, many of which she had Mackintosh design. With its uncompromising shape and a brilliant abstract panel of glass, the washstand shows the architect/designer at the height of his creative power.