LOCAL HERSTORY TIME (my first as a Glasweigan!) You’ve probably all heard of the famous Scottish architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh, right? But did you know his wife was also a famous artist in her own right? And she died OTD in 1933.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864 – 1933) was an English-born artist who worked in Scotland, and whose design work became one of the defining features of the Glasgow Style during the 1890s - 1900s.
Margaret Macdonald was born in Staffordshire on Bonfire Night (5th November) 1864. Her father was a colliery manager and engineer. Along with her younger sister Francis, Margaret attended the Orme Girls' School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. The family relocated to Glasgow in 1890, and both daughters enrolled as day students in design at the Glasgow School of Art. Margaret enjoyed working with various mediums including metalwork, embroidery, and textiles.
In 1896, Margaret and Frances opened up a joint studio, the Macdonald Sisters Studio at 128 Hope Street, Glasgow. There they produced book illustrations, embroidery, gesso panels, leaded glass and repoussé metalwork. Taking inspiration from their adopted city, their innovative work was inspired by Celtic imagery, literature, symbolism, and folklore.
There is debate around exactly when the sisters met Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his friend/colleague Herbert MacNair, but they probably met around 1892 at the Glasgow School of Art (where the men were also studying, but as night students). It is thought they were introduced by the headmaster who recognised that they were working in similar styles. They became known locally as "The Four" and by 1894, they were curating joint exhibitions. These works received mixed reviews – some claimed that the gaunt, linear forms of the Macdonald sisters' artwork were 'ghoulish' and earned them the moniker 'The Spook School'.
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Charles and Margaret married in 1900. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is often regarded as Scotland's most famous architect, leaving his wife somewhat in his shadow. However, she was an acclaimed artist in her day and won the admiration and respect of many, not least of all her husband who wrote to her: "Remember, you are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work ..." and reportedly said of her elsewhere: "Margaret has genius, I have only talent."
As well as the work produced with her sister, she also collaborated on important interior schemes with her husband at the start of the twentieth century. Examples include the Rose Boudoir at the International Exhibition at Turin in 1903, the designs for House for an Art Lover in 1900, and Glasgow’s Willow Tea Rooms in 1902 (which you can still visit today).
Her work was exhibited alongside her husbands at the 1900 Vienna Secession, where she would influence the Secessionists Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann. The Mackintosh’s continued to be popular in the Viennese art scene, both exhibiting at the Viennese International Art Exhibit in 1909.
In 1902, the couple received a major Viennese commission: to design the music room at a new villa in Vienna being built by Fritz Waerndorfer. The room was decorated with panels of Margaret's art: the Opera of the Winds, the Opera of the Seas, and the Seven Princesses, a new wall-sized triptych considered by some to be her finest work. This collaboration was described by contemporary critic Amelia Levetus as "perhaps their greatest work, for they were allowed perfectly free scope".
When the Waerndorfer villa was sold in 1916, “The Seven Princesses” disappeared from public view until it was rediscovered in a basement of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1990.
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Mackintosh did not rely on sketches of natural subjects as inspiration for her art, but rather drew on her imagination and reinterpretations of other sources including the Bible and the Odyssey. Her works defied her contemporaries' conceptions of art and demonstrated a recognisable originality. She provided her own take on popular themes and symbols. For example, for the opening of her studio, she portrayed broad concepts such as "Time" and "Summer" into highly stylized human forms. Many of her works incorporate muted natural tones, elongated nude human forms, and a subtle interplay between geometric and natural motifs.
Active and recognised during her career, between 1895 and 1924 she contributed to more than 40 European and American exhibitions. However, after 1921 poor health meant she struggled to work and she died in 1933, five years after her husband.
Mackintosh's most popular works include the gesso panels The May Queen, which was made to partner Charles Rennie Mackintosh's panel The Wassail for Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tearooms, and Oh ye, all ye that walk in Willowwood, which formed part of the decorative scheme for the Room de Luxe in the Willow Tearooms. All three of these are now on display in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow.
In 2008 her 1902 work The White Rose and the Red Rose was auctioned for £1.7 million. Not too shabby. I think my first tourist excursion in my new city will be a trip to the Willow Tea Rooms so I can spam everyone with more info about the amazing Margaret Mackintosh and why she was just as cool as her husband!
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