Growing up in a working class family in Glasgow’s East End, Charlie, as Cairney calls him, was positively obsessed with drawing. In fact, modern analysis of his character has led to suggestions that he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. As a condition, it can be beneficial to those in the arts who need that extra dose of obsession. What is clear is that he was born with a club foot. This gave him a limp, and Cairney suggests that the frustration with his impediment might go some way to explaining Mackintosh’s moodiness. He was something of a problem child, a loner. His policeman father grew flowers on an allotment. This was a little Eden for Mackintosh whose botanical paintings are rooted in the drawings he made of his father’s flowers.

At school, he had the option of staying on and studying at the technical workshop. Up until this point Mackintosh wanted to be an artist. But, Glasgow was booming, and buildings were springing up around the city. Mackintosh could not have failed to notice this as he walked to school. In the technical workshop, he would have learned woodwork and more technical forms of drawing.

Although his father had doubts about his son’s career ambitions, he encouraged him to apprentice himself to an architect’s office, while attending the art school at night. Later, because of his great talent, he was allowed to attend occasional day classes as well. It was while at this first architect’s office that Mackintosh met his friend, James Herbert McNair, or Bertie. Bertie was a gregarious character who took Mackintosh out of himself. Soon they were attending the art classes together. Mackintosh won many prizes and medals throughout his ten years there, including, very early on, the prize of free tuition for the rest of his time at the school.

One of the major characters in the story of Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style artists is Francis Newberry, Director of the Art School. Ultimately, he would introduce McNair and Mackintosh to two of the day school students, Frances and Margaret Macdonald. Although the introduction was based on a similarity of style, it would have fateful consequences, since McNair would later marry Frances, while Mackintosh and Margaret would also pair off.

When Mackintosh first met Margaret, he was engaged to Jessie Keppie, the sister of his boss, John Keppie. John wanted Jessie to delay marriage until Mackintosh was better established. But this wait left the relationship floundering.

Previous books have tended to focus on Mackintosh the architect, Mackintosh the designer, or Mackintosh the artist. What Cairney has done is to give us the boy and the man. An actor as well as a writer, Cairney first began preparing the ground for this book in the seventies when he wrote and played in a lecture-play about Mackintosh. Later it would develop into a TV drama. During his research, he spoke to many of Mackintosh’s contemporaries and friends, gaining valuable insight into the man. One particularly interesting anecdote relates to what must have been a death knell incident in the Jessie-Mackintosh engagement.

It occurred at a dance. Mackintosh didn’t dance because of his limp, and was often teased about this. Normally he shrugged it off, but that night it seemed to get to him and he disappeared often to take surreptitious drinks from his hip flask. In those days he was not yet a drinker, and people laughed as he stumbled about. When a reel came on, he grabbed Jessie’s hand and pulled her to the dance floor where he whirled her round faster and faster before letting her go. She crashed into the onlookers. The ensuing screams stopped the music. Then, after a silence, a male voice called out, “Mackintosh, you’re a cad.”

Toshie just stood in the empty dance space, head bowed. Then he drew his flask from his pocket, saying, “you’re quite right, sir - I’ll drink to that.”

But the flask was empty and he threw it to the floor then staggered out.

It’s not clear whether he let her go by accident or deliberately, but the relationship petered out soon afterwards and relations with his boss John Keppie were never the same again.

Much of the problem lay with Mackintosh himself. He was his own worst enemy. But in the early years at the firm of Honeyman and Keppie, he earned himself a reputation that stretched to the Continent, particularly Germany and Austria. The Glasgow School of Art is his greatest architectural achievement, while the homes he designed and built looked forwards to the nineteen thirties. However, most clients wanted traditional styles, and Mackintosh would ultimately be hard pressed to find new customers.

His increased drinking and erratic behaviour led to Keppie asking him to leave the firm some years later. Mackintosh set up his own office, but was unable to find work. One friend, visiting him, found him in a deep state of depression. This man believed that Mackintosh was living in the wrong time. He belonged in the 15th century with Leonardo. But it could also be argued that he was simply born too soon. Mackintosh is regarded by many now as a pioneer of Modernism. Nothing better illustrates the shocking difference between his vision and that of the world around him than a comparison of Mackintosh and Margaret’s own domestic interiors with those typical of the era. The Victorians and Edwardians loved clutter. The Mackintosh’s, in contrast, lived in minimalist white rooms with grey carpets. They had furniture designed with simple lines. They were decades ahead of their time.

For years, Mackintosh had overworked himself, juggling projects that were wildly different: interior designs for tea rooms, furniture designs, public and domestic architecture. What he really wanted was the contract to design Liverpool Cathedral. A cathedral was his great ambition, but he was knocked out of the competition early on, and the job was given to a man who hadn’t even qualified yet, who was the son of a famous architect. Mackintosh always believed there was something odd about the whole thing. The disappointment of Liverpool Cathedral would hang over him for a long time.

He was heading for a nervous breakdown even before leaving Keppie’s firm. When it came, Margaret took him south on a holiday. They left on a train, not realising that they were leaving for good. It was 1914. The War would see Mackintosh living in a small English seaside village where his “foreign” accent and suspicious looking mail from Germany would lead to him being arrested in an incident that might be comic but for the tragedy of the man at the centre of it. The accusation of treason hurt him deeply. But it was while he was living in that village that he returned to his first love, painting. Architecture, for the most part, was now in the past. Living in Chelsea later, he did have a few jobs designing interiors. More work might have come his way eventually, if he’d stayed. The London establishment wasn’t familiar with Mackintosh’s architectural work. They only knew of his reputation for being difficult. In the end, the Mackintosh’s left for France. There they moved about, but Port Vendres was a favoured place, and Mackintosh would paint many landscapes there.

Today, Mackintosh watercolours can fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds at auction. But while they were living in Chelsea, Mackintosh was forced to ask friends to buy his paintings to help pay the rent. Then they might sell for £20 or £30.

Mackintosh loved painting. In France, he found happiness and peace. When Margaret had to leave him to attend to some affairs in England, he wrote devoted letters that reveal a happy and close relationship. But it’s in those letters that he starts to complain about a pain in his tongue. This was the first sign of the cancer that would eventually kill him. Although he returned to England for treatment, after he died, his ashes were taken back to France by Margaret, at his request, and scattered at Port Vendres.

The irony of Mackintosh’s story is that while he died in relative obscurity, he’s now the most famous Scottish architect of all time. His life is seen, though, as a series of “what ifs.” Like: what if he’d married Jessie? One man Cairney spoke to believed that Jessie would have kept Mackintosh in Glasgow. Mackintosh loved children, Margaret didn’t. If he’d had a family with Jessie, it’s suggested, Keppie would have been obliged to offer Mackintosh more support, giving him access to the firm’s clients, instead of leaving him to fend for himself with competition entries. But then he might never have become a great watercolour painter, and would never have had the working relationship he had with Margaret, an artist he deeply respected. Perhaps Mackintosh’s greatest achievement was to excel in more than one medium. As a result, his reputation extends beyond architecture and design. Which is fitting for a man who once said he’d give as much care to the design of a pepper-pot as he would to a cathedral.

‘The Quest For Charles Rennie Mackintosh’ is a revealing look into the less well known aspects of the artist-architect. It covers too the difficult lives of Bertie and Frances Macdonald. The book comes with extensive appendices, covering not just chronology, but also the history and prices of Mackintosh’s work at auction, a bibliography, a map and details of his buildings in Glasgow, and a history of the rebuilding of Mackintosh’s reputation and the various people involved. Cairney, an East End boy himself, is an able story-teller. He brings a strong Glaswegian air to the proceedings. And while there are a few typographical quibbles, it’s otherwise a long-needed personal look into a man who was so much more than just a handsome, but tragic genius.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.