Charles Rennie Mackintosh Furnitures

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles was born into a large family in a Glasgow suburb and attended the Alan Glen High School from 1877 to 1884. Then he took evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art and joined the firm of Honeyman and Keppie, becoming a partner in 1904.
While he was at the School of Art he became close friends with three fellow students, one of whom, the attractive English girl, Margaret MacDonald, became his wife and muse. Mackintosh and his friends wanted to distinguish themselves from Victorian mediocrity and joined the English “Art and Crafts” movement. He also drew close to the Viennese school of Hoffman Olbrich Moser and the painter Klimt. He shared the ideas of the Viennese and shunned the decorative excesses of the French Art Nouveau.
He liked to build his furniture in wood, a ductile and malleable material that he covered with lacquer, joints and attachments almost as if to camouflage
it and highlight only the final shapes.
In 1896 the twenty-eight year old Scotsman won the most important competition of his career: to design the new Glasgow School of Art building. That same year he was commissioned to decorate the interior of the Buchanan Street Tea Room for Miss Catherine Cranston which marked the start of a fruitful partnership.
The year 1918 marked the beginning of a period of silence, without commissions.
This led him to move to France with his wife and devote himself to watercolor painting in which he revealed the same perfectionism that had distinguished his architecture. He returned to Port Vendres at the end of 1927 and died the following year in a London hospital.