Combining a progressive modernity with the spirit of romanticism, the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh created many of the best loved and most influential buildings, furniture and decorative schemes of the early 20th century.
Few designers can claim to have created a unique and individual style that is so instantly recognisable. Famous today as a designer of chairs, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect who designed schools, offices, churches, tearooms and homes, an interior designer and decorator, an exhibition designer, a designer of furniture, metalwork, textiles and stained glass and, in his latter years, a watercolourist.
Excelling in all these areas, Mackintosh left hundreds of designs and a rich volume of realised work. His distinctive style mixed together elements of the Scottish vernacular and the English Arts and Crafts tradition with the organic forms of Art Nouveau and a drive to be modern. As his work matured Mackintosh employed bolder geometric forms in place of organic-inspired symbolic decoration.