C.R. Mackintosh Furniture

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928)

Famous today as a designer of chairs, Scottish architect and designer C.R. Mackintosh excelled in virtually all areas of art, architecture and design; he worked in interior design, furniture, textiles, metals, and later in his years, watercolor. Born in Glasgow and suffering from bad foot and eye problems, C.R. Mackintosh spent time as a child sketching the Scottish countryside. In 1884 at the age of 16, he began an apprenticeship to an architect named John Hutchinson, and joined a firm of architects in 1889 where he began developing his own style. All along he attended evening classes in art at the Glasgow School of Art, where he first met his wife, Margaret MacDonald. Mackintosh blended elements of traditional Scottish architecture and the English Arts and Crafts tradition with the organic forms of Art Nouveau and a drive to be modern, contrasting strong right angles and floral-inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves. As his work matured, he began to use bolder geometric forms in place of organic-inspired symbolic decoration.