Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was a Glasgow-born architect and designer of furniture and interiors whose work was carried out primarily in that city and its environs. Mackintosh, who collaborated in much of his design work with his wife, designer Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh (1865-1933), attended the Glasgow School of Art. He joined the architectural firm of Honeyman and Keppie in 1889 and in 1896 he won the competition to design the new building for the Art School (1897-1909). The school was his most important commission but others included William Davidson's home, Windyhill (1901), at Kilmalcolm and Catherine Cranston's Hill House (1903-4) at Helensburgh. Mackintosh also took on a fair number of design commissions for furniture and interiors and Cranston was his most important client. All three of the chairs discussed in this essay were designed for her chain of Tea Rooms in Glasgow between 1897 and 1917. These chairs show traces of the primary influences on Mackintosh's designs: the Arts and Crafts movement and Japanese design. Although there are marked similarities between Mackintosh's early design work and that of the emerging Art Nouveau style, the former was well underway prior to the emergence of the latter. In the case of the designers of the Vienna Secession, however, Mackintosh and his fellow Glasgow designers were much admired in Austria and there was a strong degree of mutual influence.

As students at the Art School Mackintosh and MacDonald had

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"aggressively rustic" than other trends commonly identified with the movement (such as Morris' own elegant flowered wallpapers and tapestries) (Adams 67). This chair is not at all pretentious in design and certainly not in construction where "the joinery is deliberately left visible and the decoration is reduced to a minimum" (Adams 67). The chair is made of ash and the lightly stained pieces make the most of the grain of the wood. The flow of the grain's lines through the simple, flat rungs of the chair's back is more than enough decoration and the humped shape of these panels seems deliberately designed to maximize the area in which this 'decoration' can be displayed. Although sketches for a similar chair (ill. in Adams 69) show the legs and struts as carefully turned in a series of billows and knobs, the actual chair has very plain legs and struts which feature only slight tapering at their ends. And with its straight, tall back the chair is reminiscent of Shaker furniture, which was an important influence on the movement. With its unadulterated materials, simple lines, rustic cane seat, and lack of extrinsic decoration the Gimson chair meets the Arts and Crafts criteria for being derived from earlier models, for respec

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