Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish artist and architect who lived from 1868 to 1928. Mackintosh was one of the main architects within the Art Nouveau movement in Britain. He is often called the pioneer of the Modernist movement. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, to a family with 11 children, Mackintosh did very well in school, winning a traveling studentship that allowed him to study ancient architecture.
After his studies, Charles Rennie Mackintosh he moved back home and got a job working at an architectural firm where he designed his first major project, the Glasgow Herald Building. While in school, Mackintosh and an artist friend, Herbert MacNair, were introduced to fellow artists and sisters, Margaret and Frances MacDonald, at the Glasgow School of Art. By 1899, MacNair and Frances MacDonald were married and by 1900, Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald were also married. The two couples collaborated on their art and were known in the Glasgow art scene as “The Four”.
In 1913, Mackintosh resigned from the architectural firm where he was working to be on his own. In the early twentieth century, industrialization created an economic boom in the city of Glasgow. This prosperity allowed for many opportunities for Mackintosh to work. The Industrial Revolution, along with the emerging Japanese stylistic influence (Japonisme) and modernism, heavily affected Mackintosh’s designs. He was quite taken with the simple forms, natural materials, and quality of space Japanese styles exhibited, and added those features to more functional and practical designs. During this period, ostentation and clutter was out of fashion while clean and open space was in. Mackintosh developed his own signature style that used strong right angles with floral-decorative motifs.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh left the field of architecture and focused on his art. He created a series of watercolor landscapes and floral studies. Mackintosh and his wife moved to southern France where he continued working on his watercolors, many of them depicting his new home. In 1915, while living in France, Mackintosh was actually arrested as he was suspected of being a spy for the Germans. Since he kept to himself and took “odd” walks at night, neighbors thought that he was a spy. When police came to question him, they couldn’t understand his thick Glaswegian accent, so they locked him up. He was actually detained for a week before he was deemed innocent. Illness forced him back to Britain and in 1928, he died at only 60 years old from throat and tongue cancer.
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