Charles Rennie Mackintosh (originally spelled McIntosh) was born at 70 Parson Street, Glasgow, on 7 June 1868, the second of eleven children of William McIntosh, a police inspector who later rose to be a superintendent, and his wife Margaret Rennie who came from Ayr. From birth he had a contracted sinew in one foot which later in life resulted in a limp.
In 1874 the McIntosh family moved to 2 Firpark Street, Dennistoun, from which William McIntosh rented part of the grounds of Golfhill House. There he grew flowers in which his family were encouraged to take an interest, the origin of Mackintosh's life-long interest in botanical forms as a subject matter for the watercolours and sources for his decorative work. At the age of seven Mackintosh was sent first to Reid's School, and then to Alan Glen's, despite suffering from dyslexia. There a chill on the sportsfield resulted in a slight droop of the right eyelid visible in some photographs.
In 1884 Mackintosh was articled to John Hutchison, a Paisley architect who had settled in Glasgow. The office was then at 107 St Vincent Street, which was owned by Hutchison's brother James, who had a furniture shop there: this early acquaintance with that trade may have had some bearing on Mackintosh's role as a furniture designer. The office soon moved to better premises at 124 St Vincent Street where Hutchison began to attract much larger commissions: these commenced with Wylie Hill's department store in Buchanan Street, the detail design work of which was now in the hands of Andrew Black, an articled pupil of Hutchison who had risen to chief assistant. This building had refined Early Renaissance detail in which Mackintosh probably had a hand; he had distinguished himself at Glasgow School of Art where he studied under Thomas Smith and became acquainted with John James Burnet as a visiting lecturer and tutor. At the School Mackintosh featured regularly in the prize lists, culminating in a South Kensington bronze medal for 'a mountain chapel' and a book prize for 'a presbyterian church' in 1888 and 1889 respectively. In the latter year, probably April although he did not appear in the office books until July, these awards brought Mackintosh a place in the newly formed partnership of John Honeyman and John Keppie at 140 Bath Street; and in the following year, 1890, he won another major award, the South Kensington National and Queen's Prize, the subject being a Science and Art Museum. This was a French Beaux-Arts scheme, close to Burnet's style in the early 1880s, and may have reflected designs Keppie himself had made during his time at the Ecole in 1884-85. In September of the same year Mackintosh won the Alexander Thomson travelling scholarship with a design for a public hall, neo-Greek as expected by the Thomson trustees although he himself had by then come to regard classical architecture as 'foreign in spirit and far away' in a lecture on Scottish architecture given in February of that year. He set out for Italy on 21 March 1891 and sketched intensively in Naples, Sicily, Umbria and Tuscany, returning in July with a great many sketches but none of the highly finished studies the trustees had probably been expecting to see.
At Honeyman and Keppie's Mackintosh became a close friend of Keppie and of Herbert McNair who had joined the office in 1888 and whose family had links with Honeyman. His skill in draughtsmanship quickly won him an exceptional position in the office: He contributed much of the detailed draughtsmanship to Honeyman and Keppie's separate submissions for Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Manchester Technical Schools; and when Honeyman and Keppie won places in the second tier of the Art Gallery competition they submitted a completely new joint design which was patently drawn out by Mackintosh and incorporated many features from his Italian sketch books. It did not win, but the enthusiasm for it nearly resulted in Waterhouse's recommendation that John William Simpson & Milner Allen be appointed being overturned. From that point onwards Honeyman and Keppie were content to let Mackintosh become the lead designer in the practice, and even sign the drawings in the case of the addition to Glasgow Art Club. Within the next few years Mackintosh had had a very considerable hand in the design of Queen Margaret College and the competition design for the Royal Insurance building, both in Glasgow, and according to a letter written to Hermann Muthesius, he had wholly designed the Glasgow Herald Building in 1893-95. All of these had Scots Renaissance elements of Burnetian inspiration, although the tower of the Herald building derived from that of James MacLaren’s Stirling High School, and the corner dome of the Royal Insurance design was drawn from Belcher; also in some degree Burnetian was his Martyrs School, Glasgow of 1895 which had Japanese roof details. These were apparently prompted by Sellars's effective use of them at the Glasgow International Exhibition buildings in 1888 since Mackintosh's sketch of them has recently been found, but it is also known that Mackintosh was familiar with the relevant volumes of Japanese art and architecture at Glasgow School of Art.
In 1892-93 Mackintosh delivered two papers on contemporary architecture. The first of these was drawn from Ruskin and Baldwin Brown and rejected not only the temple-based architecture of the Thomson, Honeyman, Barclay and Sellars school but the entire spectrum of Renaissance architecture then in vogue. It also argued against the integrated eclecticism of his own Kelvingrove design on the grounds that one style must be weakened by the introduction of another. The second lecture drew heavily on Lethaby's 'Architecture Mysticism and Myth'. By the time it was given Mackintosh's circle had extended to the Symbolist Movement artists Frances and Margaret Macdonald as well as Agnes Raeburn, Janet Aitken, Kate Cameron and Keppie's sister Jessie, a group which had called itself The Immortals and weekended in two bungalows - 'The Roaring Camp'- rented by John Keppie at Dunure. The influence of the Macdonald sisters in particular was reflected in Mackintosh's symbolist watercolour, the Harvest Moon, painted in 1892, and in a number of items of graphic art.
In September 1894 Mackintosh set off on the first on a number of English study tours in search of a back-to-first principles arts and crafts vernacular honesty. These quickly resulted in a synthesis of English and Scottish vernacular which made its first appearance in a small job, the reconstruction of the Inn at Lennoxtown in 1895, the designs for which were not carried out. The concept was not entirely new, as it had been pioneered by James MacLaren and Dunn & Watson at Fortingall, and their work had in turn formed the inspiration for the early Colinton houses of their assistant Lorimer. Of the Fortingall buildings Mackintosh would be aware through the Architectural Illumination Society which published them in 'The Architect' in 1891-92, even if he never went there.
In 1893 the Glasgow School of Art withdrew from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery project and its head, Francis Newbery inspected the new art schools at Birmingham and Manchester to prepare a brief for a new site in Renfrew Street which was acquired in 1895. This brief was issued to selected competitors in June 1896 and together with the tight cost limit must have had considerable influence on all the designs submitted; the studios had to be north facing on the Renfrew Street frontage and not only their sizes but the dimensions of their windows were specified. The competition was won by Honeyman & Keppie in January 1897 with a design by Mackintosh which had plain but highly original Scots vernacular-based southern and end elevations and a deep eaves over the studio windows on the north. Its details were drawn from a variety of original vernacular and modern sources, H E Clifford, Smith & Brewer, and particularly James MacLaren at the segment-headed two light windows of the east gable at the centre of the north elevation, but none of these was directly copied: all were re-designed and refined in a highly individual manner. As at Martyrs School there were Japanese elements most obviously at the railings and in the timberwork of the interior. The same idiom was adopted at Ruchill Street Free Church Halls in 1898-99 and at the Daily Record Building in Renfield Lane where the middle floors were of white glazed brick with stylised Tree of Life motifs adapted from Lethaby. At Queen's Cross Church, designed early in 1897, an equally original gothic treatment was adopted, its steeply battered tower based on a medieval example sketched at Merriot in Somerset.
These works were all designed as Honeyman & Keppie's chief assistant, but from 1896 Mackintosh began to build up a small clientele of his own. The most important of these was Miss Catherine Cranston, beginning with the wall decoration of the Buchanan Street Tea Rooms in 1896, the furniture of the Argyle Street Tea Rooms in 1898-99 and the complete interior design of the Ingram Street Tea Rooms in 1900. Concurrently he designed Windyhill at Kilmacolm for the Glasgow provision merchant William Davidson. Like MacLaren and Dunn & Watson's buildings in Glenlyon it had the wholly convincing traditional proportions of solid and void which eluded nearly all other architects at this time, and displayed an even more profound understanding of the true nature of the vernacular.
Some time before 1896 Mackintosh became attached to John Keppie's younger sister Jessie, born 1868 and thus the same age as himself. This attachment was commemorated in a jewel box: there was no formal engagement, but perhaps an understanding that there would be if he was taken into partnership. But by 1897 he had transferred his affections to the older but more imaginative Margaret Macdonald and on 22 August 1900 they were married, a flat at 120 Mains Street having been transformed for their occupation by March 1900. In the meantime McNair had married Margaret's much younger sister Frances in June 1899. This smaller group from The Immortals became known as The Four. Their work was exhibited at the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in London in September 1896 and noticed in The Studio in 1897, in Decorative Kunst in 1898 and all four were invited to exhibit at the Vienna Secession in November 1900. In the following month Alexander Koch, the Darmstadt publisher of Academy Architecture, announced the Haus eine Kunstfreundes competition. The Mackintoshes' submission could not be considered as the required interior perspectives had not been provided, but Koch published their completed designs along with Baillie Scott's and Leopold Bauer's. This consolidated their European reputation which had begun with Hermann Muthesius's interest in Mackintosh’s work from 1897, and brought a steady stream of distinguished Austrian and German visitors to Glasgow. Muthesius published the Glasgow Herald building in Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart in 1900, and was to bring Mackintosh still greater international fame with the publication of Das englische Haus in 1904-05. On 1 January 1901 John Honeyman, by then almost blind, retired at the age of seventy. He allowed Mackintosh to buy out his partnership on more generous terms than he could afford, the practice then becoming Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh. The partnership was retrospective, drawn up by Keppie as late as 10 October 1901, and specified a period of ten years. For the first three years from 1901 to 1903, Honeyman was to receive half the practice's profits. From the remaining half Keppie was to be paid two thirds and Mackintosh one third. For the next two years, 1904 and 1905, Keppie was to receive three-fifths of the profits and Mackintosh two-fifths. Thus Mackintosh did not have to put up any capital but the equal division of the profits from 1906 was to lead to problems later as Keppie's clientele was much larger, and was to remain so. Although his sister's disappointment had damaged their hitherto close relationship, Keppie was initially content with this arrangement and treated Mackintosh generously in the division of the profits for the next decade. But although the completion of Glasgow School of Art and the commission for Scotland Street School were allocated to Mackintosh, the partnership was to seriously limit Mackintosh's opportunities for creative design: as senior assistant he could design whatever commissions came in, but from 1901 Keppie kept his own clients to himself and returned to the drawing board. Initially the partnership went well for Mackintosh with work at Kingsborough Gardens for Newbery's aunt, an exhibition of Mackintosh's work at Turin in 1902, the Hill House for the publisher Walter Blackie in 1902-04, the Willow Tea Room in 1903 and extensive work at the Hous'Hill in 1904-05, both for Miss Cranston, and a number of commissions for interior work and furniture in Austria and Germany. In the 1960s Alex Smellie recalled that Mackintosh had raised the possibility of spending part of each year in Vienna to deal with continental business, an arrangement made practicable by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s fluent German. Keppie declined to agree, mainly because of the steady stream of work for Miss Cranston which would have been difficult to deal with in his absence.
The ending of the payments to Honeyman and the general increase in the Mackintoshes' prosperity enabled Mackintosh to buy 6 Florentine Terrace, Ann Street, Hillhead for £925 on 30 March 1906. The interior was remodelled on similar lines to the Mains Street flat at a cost of a further £900 with the aid of a substantial loan from Keppie. In December of that same year Mackintosh was admitted FRIBA, his proposers being Keppie, Thomas Lennox Watson and John James Burnet. In May 1908 the Mackintoshes took what was probably their first foreign holiday unconnected with business at Cintra in Portugal.
This holiday represented a break during the most important work of Mackintosh's career, the library wing of Glasgow School of Art. On 1 February 1907 Keppie and Mackintosh were instructed to redesign their scheme for the unbuilt western section. It was completed in December 1909, but not without serious differences in February 1908 with the building committee - which included Burnet, Forrest Salmon and David Barclay - over the design of the library and the aggrandisement of the western basement entrance. This followed an earlier and much more public and damaging dispute with Glasgow School Board in October-November 1905 over tile work, the size of the window panes and ultimately an overspend at Scotland Street School. The commission for Auchinibert, where Mackintosh put his English sketches to good use in an accomplished neo-Tudor design ended in differences with his clients Mr and Mrs Francis Shand, who called in Alexander Hislop to complete the interior.
Although the sheer merit of the west wing of Glasgow School of Art and the Oak Room addition to Miss Cranston's Ingram Street tea room in 1907 were not denied, these events undermined Keppie's confidence in Mackintosh as a partner at a time when their ten-year partnership agreement was drawing to a close. It was not terminated on 1 January 1910 as it could have been, but appears to have been continued on a provisional year to yeat basis. In the event the Finance Act of 1909 which introduced the increment tax on new development brought about a sharp decline in the partnership’s income. As in other practices at this time the volume of work halved in 1910, and halved again in 1911. Mackintosh's only significant new commissions were the Chinese Room of 1911 and the Cloister Room of 1913 both at Ingram Street, a ladies' hairdressing salon at 80 Union Street also of 1912, and additions to Auchenbothie Mains and Mossyde at Kilmacolm. Although in the Cloister Room Mackintosh had finally adopted a Viennese inspired idiom which anticipated art deco and might well have proved fashionable, the problems in the practice came to a head with the Jordanhill Training College limited competition of 1913: large public commissions were now critical to the practice as privately commissioned work had dried up. The preparation of the submission fell to Mackintosh, but when the deadline drew near it became apparent that he had designs only for the College itself and that these were on tracing paper which had gone crinkly with watercolour washes. At the last minute Andrew Graham Henderson, a New Zealander who had been a rising star in the office since Mackintosh engaged him in 1904, prepared a classical design for the demonstration school. It was the only element of their submission to be successful when the results were announced in July 1913.
One month earlier, sometime in June, the partnership of Keppie and Mackintosh was dissolved. The catalyst was a threat from Graham Henderson that he would leave if Mackintosh remained a partner. Keppie was not the sort of man who would respond to threats of that kind, but by that date the partnership had been under review for more than a year. In 1912, tow years after the partnership agreement had expired, Keppie had made a detailed financial analysis of partnership income from 1901 to 1911 which showed that Mackintosh had introduced £4,934 worth of business to the practice and Keppie £16,303 and that Mackintosh's share of the profits had been £5,467, £533 more than the business introduced. The further continuation of the 1901 partnership agreement was thus unsustainable. Mackintosh had to leave to set up practice on his own, but no business came his way. Allof these problems affected his health from at least 1911 if not earlier. In July 1914 Margaret induced him to recuperate at Walberswick in Suffolk: Florentine Terrace was then let to a tenant. It was eventually sold to the Davidsons in 1920 after a reminder from Keppie that the interest would shortly be due but would be waived if he sold it before the settlement date.
Mackintosh recovered at Walberswick, where Jessie Newbery found them a studio. Patrick Geddes provided him with some temporary work and he made streetblock designs for Geddes's town planning schemes in India. Nothing came of these and in May 1915 the military authorities confiscated his German and Austrian papers. These were duly read and returned after five weeks but the Mackintoshes were ordered to leave the Walberswick area. By August 1915 they had found studios in Glebe Place in Chelsea where they became friends of J D Ferguson and his wife Margaret Morris, James Pryde, Randolph Schwabe and the photographer E O Hoppe. From there the Mackintoshes produced watercolours and adventurous textile designs commissioned by William Foxton which for a time at least seem to have sold well. Mackintosh also designed for Wenman Basset-Lowke the reconstruction of 78 Derngate, Northampton in which the style of the Cloister Room was most successfully exploited, the work being supervised by W J Anderson's brother Alexander Ellis Anderson.
By early 1919 the Mackintoshes were in some financial difficulty and had to call on the Davidsons for help. Schemes for studios at Glebe Place for the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood and Harold Squire came to very little and a proposed theatre for Margaret Morris did not get off the drawing board at all. In January 1924 the Mackintoshes settled first in Amelie-les-Bains, moving to Ille-sur-Têt in the Pyrenees in February. By December they had settled at the Hotel du Commerce at Port Vendres from which Mackintosh produced watercolours of the local landscape which were amongst his finest works. But in May 1927 Margaret had to return to London with medical problems, and soon thereafter Mackintosh was found to have cancer of the tongue and throat. He returned to London in the autumn for radium treatment which eventually left him unable to speak. After short periods in rooms in Hampstead and in a friend's house in Porchester Square, Mackintosh died in a London nursing home on 10 December 1928. He was cremated the next day at Golders Green.
Margaret Mackintosh survived him: there were no children of the marriage. She kept on the Chelsea studio but spent most of her time in France. After brief periods in Falmouth and Harrogate she returned to Chelsea in December 1932 and died in a London nursing home on 7 January 1933.