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 worked closely with Margaret's sister Frances (1873-1921) and Charles' friend Herbert MacNair (who also wed in 1899). "The Four," as they came to be called, formed the core of the emerging Glasgow design style. They were invited, as a group, to send "modern" work to the important Arts and Crafts Society Exhibition in London in 1896 where their pieces "evoked a storm of protest from public an critics alike" (Howarth 38). They were strongly criticized for their...