Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in the Townhead district of the Glasgow on 7th June 1868, one of 11 children. At the age of 16 he began an apprenticeship with John Hutchinson, and started evening classes at Glasgow School of Art. Five years later, he was taken on by Glasgow architects Honeyman and Keppie as an architectural assistant, and formalised his attendance at the School of Art.

While studying at Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh met his future wife, Margaret Macdonald. She was to make significant contributions to a number of his major commissions as a highly accomplished artist and designer in her own right, working in metal, fabrics, watercolours and oils.

The Four
Also studying at the School of Art were Margaret's sister, Frances, and Herbert McNair. 'The Four', as they became known, exhibited furnishings, posters and designs in Glasgow, London, Turin and Vienna. All four shared a fondness for distinctive imagery, and they were nicknamed 'the Spook School' by their critics, who disliked the obvious European art nouveau influences in their work. They were major contributors to what became known as 'the Glasgow Style'.

International acclaim
Throughout his career, Mackintosh's work tended to receive greater appreciation overseas than in Britain, with Austria and Germany particularly receptive to his originality. In 1900 his work was exhibited in Vienna to general acclaim, and he was commissioned to design the city's Wamdorfer Music Salon. In 1902 a Mackintosh Room featured at the Turin International Exhibition, and he also exhibited in Berlin and Moscow.

Domestic commissions
Mackintosh's career received its first major domestic boost when he won a competition to design the new Glasgow School of Art in 1896, and on the building's completion in 1909, it was immediately lauded as a stylistically innovative structure. It remains one of Mackintosh's greatest works, and continues to fulfil its original role.

In 1902 Mackintosh received another significant commission when he was asked to design The Hill House in Helensburgh for publisher Walter Blackie. Today, The Hill House is in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, and a visit is a must for anyone who wishes to see Mackintosh's 'private' work at its best.

One of the projects Mackintosh is most readily associated with is The Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street, designed for Kate Cranston, daughter of a Glasgow tea merchant. Cranston was one of Mackintosh's principal patrons over 20 years of collaboration, with work carried out on all four of her tea rooms between 1897 and 1917. The Sauchiehall Street Willow Tea Rooms are located above a jeweller's shop, and a typically modernistic Mackintosh facade still catches the eye in contrast to the more traditional buildings around it. Inside, the Room de Luxe attracted great attention on account of its silver furniture and leaded mirror friezes.

The Mackintosh style
Mackintosh's architectural philosophy involved radically updating the Scottish Baronial style, favouring elegantly rectilinear designs, free from what he called 'antiquarian detail'. He was a collector of Japanese architectural books and prints, and in much of his work traditional Scottish design meets art nouveau, harnessing the simplicity of Japanese form in the process.

'What he has is a distinct vision. In most cases, you could look at a late 19th-century chair and be confused about who designed it. That's not the case with Mackintosh', says Pamela Robertson, Senior Curator of the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum and an expert on Mackintosh and his circle. 'His architectural style had a distinctive edge,' she continues, 'and the sophistication of his artistic imagination is notable. He combined powerful architectural forms and soft, seductive decoration in a very distinctive way.'

Disillusion and exile
In 1904 Mackintosh became a partner in Honeyman and Keppie, but he became more disillusioned with a lack of recognition and a shortage of private commissions in Scotland, not helped by his 'total design' approach, which inevitably limited the number of personal projects he was entrusted with. A perfectionist who did not entertain compromise, he was not always the easiest of men to work with.

In 1901 Mackintosh had entered a competition to design a new Anglican cathedral for Liverpool, and had he been successful, he would almost certainly have achieved the attention and respect he desired. To his intense frustration, his design was narrowly beaten.

In 1913 he left Honeyman and Keppie, moving with Margaret to Walberswick on the Suffolk coast. Depressed and finding solace in drink, an embittered Mackintosh never returned to his native city.

Final Years
The couple settled in London in 1914, and two years later - in one of his final design commissions - Mackintosh produced striking interiors for renowned engineering model-maker and traveller WJ Bassett-Lowke at 78 Derngate in Northampton. The house is now in the hands of a trust, which is in the process of restoration.

By 1923, Mackintosh had abandoned architectural practice entirely, and he and Margaret moved to Port Vendres in the south of France, where he devoted himself to watercolour landscape painting. He returned to London in 1927 to undergo treatment for cancer of the tongue, and died there on 10th December 1928.

Revival
It sometimes seems Mackintosh faded into comparative obscurity in his own lifetime, and has only returned to prominence during the last few years, but according to Pamela Robertson that is not the case: 'Mackintosh never disappeared as far as his peer group was concerned. There was always a high regard for his achievements within the world of architecture and design - he was always recognised as a major creative figure.

'The public revival of interest came from various sources, including the first scholarly exhibition of his work, which was staged in Edinburgh in 1968 to mark the centenary of his birth, and through the 1970s, you could say that Mackintosh succeeded through the salerooms, as it were. A Mackintosh chair sold in 1975 for around £9,000 - a world record then for 20th-century furniture. This was another indicator of the status of his work, and it helped Glasgow as a city to recognise the value of the Mackintosh material it had in various collections.

'Then Glasgow saw culture as something to replace its old heavy industries, and wanted to become a place people visited rather than just passed through. Mackintosh was the outstanding creative figure in architecture and design in Glasgow during the late 19th century, and an obvious figurehead and symbol of the revival of the city. The Hunterian opened in 1980, with its Mackintosh collection, then the Willow Tea Rooms were restored and re-opened, and the National Trust for Scotland took over The Hill House, so more and more Mackintosh-related work became accessible to the public during the 1980s.'

In total, a dozen key Mackintosh sites have been identified in and around Glasgow. As Pamela Robertson points out, 'You have to come to Glasgow to see Mackintosh's architecture. Visitors get all sides of Mackintosh, from the big, public buildings to the smaller-scale Willow Tea Rooms, and even the recreation of his private house, where he lived from 1906 to 1914, in the Hunterian Art Gallery.

In the USA, The Smithsonian Magazine described Mackintosh as 'a Scottish national obsession', which is a slight exaggeration. But then again, somebody is buying all those engraved hip-flasks, earrings and key-holders ...

(Reproduced by kind permission of Scotland Magazine)