Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1868, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect, decorator and painter. Whilst apprenticed to the architect John Hutchinson, he began attending evening classes in architecture at Glasgow School of Art, where he won many prizes and a travelling scholarship to Italy, France and Belgium. On his return to Glasgow, he met the two sisters Frances and Margaret MacDonald, and together with Herbert MacNair, they formed the Glasgow Four group. The group created a specifically Scottish variant of European Art Nouveau. In 1904 he became a partner in the firm of Honeyman and Keppie, and that same year saw the opening of the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow, for which he had designed furnishings and fittings. One of Mackintosh's most famous buildings is the Glasgow School of Art. Aside from his enormous and very distinctive influence as an architect and designer, he also painted in water-colour, with great precision and sensitivity, in Suffolk and the South of France. He died in 1928.