Times Past: What did Toshie mean to our city at the start of the 20th century?

Thanks in great part to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society which was founded in 1973 and has more than 1000 members worldwide, more Scots now know about Toshie, as his family and friends called him, than when he died of cancer at the age of 60 in London in 1928.

Proof of that contention is that six years ago, the National Trust for Scotland carried out a Great Scot poll and Mackintosh came second only to Robert Burns, albeit Rabbie was well out in front as he should have been.

But what did Mackintosh mean to Glasgow at the start of the 20th century and why for so long was he more renowned abroad than at home?

At the risk of being controversial, I am not going to say that Mackintosh changed the face of Glasgow as much as say, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, not least because some of Toshie’s finest works were carried out furth of the city in places like Helensburgh – the fabulous Hill House – and Kilmacolm where his Windy Hill or Windyhill creation is the only other surviving Scottish house designed by Mackintosh and completed in his lifetime, the House for An Art Lover in Bellahouston Park being built to his design decades after his death.             

Two of the finest writers on design and architecture, Charlotte and Peter Fiell, wrote this of Mackintosh: “While he never received major recognition in his hometown of Glasgow, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic details inspired modernists across Europe.”

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It would be wrong, however, to say that Mackintosh was entirely snubbed by his own city and Glaswegian patrons played a huge part in his life. Born in Townhead in Glasgow on June 7, 1868, Mackintosh was the second son and fourth of eleven children of police superintendent William McIntosh and his wife Margaret, née Rennie – both William and Charles changed the spelling of their names in the 1890s.  

Educated at Reid’s Public School and Allan Glen’s Institution, Mackintosh had wanted to be involved in art and design from a young age, and saw architecture as a perfect blend of both.

In Victorian times, you had to enter the architectural profession by an apprenticeship and so Mackintosh started his training in the renowned practice of John Hutchison.

At the same time, Mackintosh enrolled in various art classes at the Glasgow School of Art, then already on its way to high status in the art world, at the age of 15 and would continue his studies there for 11 years all told.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

In 1890, he was the second person to win the Alexander Thomson Travelling Scholarship and used it to travel around Europe.

It was one of several prizes he won as an apprentice and he was duly snapped up by the top practice of Honeyman and Keppie.

This must have seemed like a golden move for Mackintosh but it went sour over one of his first major tasks, helping to design the Glasgow Herald building in Mitchell Street, now The Lighthouse.

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His two employers claimed the credit, however, and though Mackintosh was later taken on as a partner, the experience soured him of working with anyone, except his wife Margaret MacDonald, herself a supremely talented artist whose genius with patterns was a hugely distinctive feature of her husband’s output.

With Margaret’s sister Frances and her husband, Toshie’s great friend Herbert McNair, they formed the Glasgow Four who promoted the Modern Style, otherwise known as British Art Nouveau.     

In his peak period between 1894 and 1907, Mackintosh designed his masterwork, the Glasgow School of Art, in two phases.

Given the fame of that tragic building, it is amazing to learn that critics in the press didn’t much like it, though Building Industries magazine, based in Glasgow, got it right: “The originality is unquestionable. If the germ conception was that of indicating, through the physiognomy of the elevation, that the mastery of excellence in art is a thing to be acquired laboriously, and in no other way,  then its working out has been attended with considerable success.”           

Mackintosh also got press pelters for both Hill House in 1904 and its forerunner, Windy Hill. The Glasgow Herald’s art critic wrote in 1901: “Windyhill, by Mr Macintosh [sic], is a mannered pen drawing of a house that shows only roofing and rough-cast, purely negative in its architecture, assertive only in its very affected simplicity.”

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Numerous designs for competitions across the UK saw his work rejected, even though in Europe both fellow architects and critics alike raved about his work, especially in Germany and Austria where he was invited to participate in international exhibitions.

By contrast, his main designs for Glasgow’s great International Exhibition of 1901 were never built.   

It was his great patron, Catherine ‘Kate’ Cranston, who helped to keep him in gainful employment with his series of four tea rooms built for Kate, the unacknowledged queen of the temperance movement. It was the last of these, the Willow on Sauchiehall Street, over which he and his wife Margaret had total control, that proved to be a masterpiece.      

The trouble with Mackintosh appears to have been his insistence on complete control of a project.

His prickly reputation, not aided by gossip about his intake of ­alcohol, went before him and in the years before the First World War he gained few commissions – his last public work was Scotland Street School in 1906 – so much so that he resigned and moved to a village in Suffolk where local people thought he was a German spy and shunned the couple.

After the war they moved to France to Port Vendres on the Mediterranean coast where Mackintosh produced some of his finest art, landscape watercolours of the Roussillon region.

Diagnosed with cancer of the tongue and throat, Toshie and Margaret moved to London where he died on December 10, 1928. 

The world, and Glasgow, now ­appreciates his genius.