Mackintosh, Charles Rennie

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie (b Glasgow, 7 June 1868; d London, 10 Dec. 1928).
Scottish architect, designer (chiefly of furniture), and watercolourist, active mainly in Glasgow. He was one of the most original and influential artists of his time and a major figure of Art Nouveau. His most famous building is Glasgow School of Art (1897–9), to which he later added a library block and other extensions (1907–9). They are strikingly original in style—clear, bold, and rational, yet with an element of fantasy. In his interior decoration and furniture design, often done in association with his wife Margaret Macdonald (1865–1933), he worked in a sophisticated calligraphic style but avoided the exaggerated floral ornament often associated with Art Nouveau. He had an enormous reputation among the avant-garde on the Continent, especially in Germany and Austria, where the advanced style of the early 20th century was sometimes known as ‘Mackintoshismus’, but admiration was more restrained in his own country, where he antagonized fellow architects by criticizing traditional values. The First World War brought a decline in his career, for there was little call for work as sophisticated as his. In 1914 he moved to London and thereafter virtually gave up architecture. He did, however, do some fine work as a designer, particularly of fabrics. From 1923 to 1927 he lived at Port Vendres in the south of France, where he devoted himself to watercolour painting, mainly landscapes. By the time of his death his reputation had declined, but it now stands very high in all the fields of his activity.