Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

For much of the twentieth century Margaret Macdonald was remembered, if at all, as the wife of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Yet in her own lifetime she was one of the most original and successful women artists in Scotland, a designer whose work was shown in more than forty exhibitions across Europe and America. With her sister Frances, her husband and Herbert MacNair she formed The Four, the circle that created the Glasgow Style, and her gesso panels are among the most haunting works of art made in Glasgow.

From Staffordshire to Glasgow

Margaret Macdonald was born on 5 November 1864 in Tipton, Staffordshire, the daughter of a colliery manager and engineer. She was educated with her younger sister Frances at the Orme Girls’ School in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and by 1890 the family had settled in Glasgow. That year both sisters enrolled as day students at the Glasgow School of Art, then led by its energetic headmaster Francis Newbery. Margaret’s school record shows prizes in ornamental design, including a first prize for majolica design in 1891 and a second prize for stained glass design in 1894.

The Four

At the School the sisters came to know two young designers, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair, probably introduced by Newbery around 1892. By 1894 the four were exhibiting together. Their work, with its elongated, ghostly figures, stylised plants and symbolic imagery, puzzled and provoked Glasgow critics, who mocked it as the "Spook School". It was in fact the beginning of the Glasgow Style, and the sisters were central to it.

In the mid-1890s Margaret and Frances left the School and set up an independent studio in the city, producing book illustrations, embroidery, metalwork, leaded glass and gesso panels. Their partnership lasted until 1899, when Frances married MacNair and moved to Liverpool.

Marriage and partnership

Margaret married Charles Rennie Mackintosh on 22 August 1900 at St Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Dumbarton. The couple made their first home in a flat at 120 Mains Street, which they remodelled together, and in 1906 moved to a terraced house in Hillhead whose interiors survive today in the Mackintosh House at the Hunterian.

How exactly they divided their work is hard to establish, because so little documentation survives. What is clear is that Margaret played a central part in the great symbolic interiors of the early 1900s, from the tea rooms to the Hill House at Helensburgh. Mackintosh himself was in no doubt. In a letter of 1927 he told her that in all his architectural efforts she had been "the half if not three quarters of them".

The gesso panels

Margaret’s finest medium was gesso, a plaster-based material that she modelled into low relief and inlaid with string, glass beads, shell and metal before painting it. In 1900 she made The May Queen for Kate Cranston's tea rooms in Ingram Street, a frieze of three panels that faced Mackintosh’s own gesso, The Wassail. Both now belong to Glasgow Museums.

For the Willow Tea Rooms of 1903 she created O Ye, All Ye That Walk in Willowwood, the centrepiece of the Room de Luxe. The original panel was acquired for Kelvingrove in 2001 with help from the Art Fund, and an exact replica was installed in the restored tea rooms in 2018.

Vienna and Turin

Margaret’s reputation, like her husband’s, was made on the Continent. In November 1900 The Four exhibited at the eighth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, where The May Queen and The Wassail were shown, and the Mackintoshes were received with enthusiasm. At the international exhibition of modern decorative art in Turin in 1902 they presented the Rose Boudoir, for which Margaret made the panel The White Rose and the Red Rose. When it was sold at auction in 2008 it fetched more than £1.7 million.

One of her most ambitious works was made for the Viennese patron Fritz Waerndorfer, who commissioned the couple to decorate his music salon. For it Margaret created The Seven Princesses, a great frieze in three parts based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, installed in 1907 and now in the MAK, Vienna’s museum of applied arts.

Later years

As Mackintosh’s architectural practice faltered, the couple left Glasgow in 1914, living first on the Suffolk coast at Walberswick and then in London, before settling in the south of France in the 1920s. Ill health and the strain of those years reduced Margaret’s output, and no work by her is known after 1921. In 1927 she spent six weeks in London for medical treatment, and Mackintosh wrote to her almost daily, letters he called his "Chronycle". He died in London in December 1928. Margaret died in Chelsea on 7 January 1933, aged 68.

Recognition

For decades after her death Margaret was overshadowed by her husband, whose revival began with the memorial exhibition of 1933 told on our Mackintosh legacy page. Modern scholarship has restored her to her place, helped by the 1990 exhibition that brought the Glasgow Girls back into view. Her work can be seen today at Kelvingrove and the Hunterian, and wherever the story of Charles Rennie Mackintosh is told, hers is now told beside it.

Timeline