Mackintosh died in London in 1928, his architectural career long over, his estate valued at less than a hundred pounds and the appraisers rating his remaining drawings as practically worthless. Glasgow had given him little work after the School of Art’s completion; the fashionable tide had run against him, and he spent his last years painting superb watercolours in France. The neglect was real — but so, quietly, was the seed of revival: in Vienna and on the Continent his reputation had never dimmed.
The rediscovery came in waves. A memorial exhibition in Glasgow in 1933 reminded the city what it had; the scholar Thomas Howarth’s great 1952 biography established him internationally as a pioneer of modern architecture; and the 1968 centenary exhibitions fixed him in the public imagination. In 1973 the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society was founded — saving Queen’s Cross Church as its base — and the Hunterian’s reconstruction of his own house interiors made his domestic world visitable.
Then Glasgow, reinventing itself in the 1980s and 90s, made Mackintosh its brand. The rose, the lettering and the high-backed chair spread across mugs, jewellery, tea towels and shop signs in a boom the city itself nicknamed ‘Mockintosh’ — easy to mock, and mocked plenty, but it paid for restorations, drew visitors in millions, and gave a post-industrial city a visual identity rooted in its own genius rather than its decline. Few artists anywhere have been so completely woven into their city’s sense of itself.
The deeper legacy is in the work’s ideas: total design, carried through from building mass to teaspoon; the fusion of Scottish tradition with radical modernity; the equal creative partnership with Margaret Macdonald — ‘I had talent,’ he insisted, ‘Margaret had genius’ — now properly recognised in her own right. Architects from Vienna in 1900 to the present have kept returning to him.
And the legacy now has a test with a date on it: the rebuilding of the fire-ruined School of Art. Whether Glasgow returns the Mack — faithfully, and as a working school — will say what the century of rediscovery finally amounted to. On past form, the city that turned ‘worthless’ drawings into its emblem will not stop short.