upon precedent for justification', but added immediately a warning against going to foreign styles for inspiration (i.e. Art Nouveau), because they are bound to be 'out of harmony with our national character and climate', and he was cross with me for having discussed his work as pioneer work of the twentieth century style. He disliked the twentieth century style, and his argument as he put it to me, when he was eighty-two, is so typical of the whole man that I want to end with it: "This new architecture cannot last. The architects have no religion. They have nothing exalted which they could try to approach; they are like designers who draw flowers and trees without remembering and honouring Him who created them'.

Il Balcone, Milan, 1950

IX

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

n. I

This introduction to Mackintosh, his life, his character and his work came out as a small book in Italian in 1950. In 1952 Thomas Howarth's Mackintosh book came out, a volume of over 300 pages with well over 200 illustrations. It is an admirable piece of work; however, I still think that my approach to Mackintosh differs sufficiently from Professor Howarth's to make an English translation and publication in the context of this volume not totally useless.*

B

EFORE 1890 no one living outside Glasgow could possibly have heard of the city as a centre of art. It may have been famous for its industries, especially its shipyards, for its trade, and its magnificent surroundings, the bare mountains and the lakes among trees, and the wide, majestic estuary of the Clyde. Artistically, Glasgow was completely provincial. Apart from M'Taggart, the solitary Impressionist, there were no original or influential painters. Architects had abandoned the Grecian austerity of the early nineteenth century, and the bold and impetuous originality in the use of Greco-Egyptian material that had characterized the work of Alexander Thomson, for a genuine and fruitful, if rather dull, imitation of the Northern Renaissance, with its high gables and its n.2 inflated details which were also the rule at that time in other British towns.*

There was a sensation, therefore, first in Great Britain and then on the Continent, when paintings by artists soon to be called the Glasgow School or the Glasgow Boys were shown, in the Grosvenor Gallery in London, in 1890, and then in the Glaspalast in Munich. These painters had obviously been inspired, apart from M'Taggart whose surprisingly independent technique was evolved shortly after 1880, by the painters of Barbizon and the Dutch Impressionists such as Mauve, Mesdag, Jongkind and the Marises. A great exhibition of the work of these had taken place in Edinburgh in 1886. Besides such examples, there was what Whistler painted in London. He, probably more than anybody else, impressed the group of the Glasgow Boys, that is James Guthrie, John Lavery, E. A. Walton, Roche, Cameron, Stevenson, Henry, Hornel, Paterson, Kennedy, Hamilton, Ferguson and others. In 1898, Lavery and E. A. Walton were made corresponding members of the Sezession, the famous Viennese artists' association, and by then their works were to be found in museums and art galleries in Paris, Brussels, Budapest and Prague. Glasgow itself was at first amazed, but at least in a few people bewilderment gave way to admiration. Glasgow Corporation bought Whistler's portrait of Carlyle as early as 1891.

Whistler and the Glasgow Boys naturally excited the greatest interest among the students of the Glasgow School of Art, to which an enterprising new director had recently been appointed, the painter Francis Newbery. It was not only the painters at the School of Art who were encouraged by the new climate; it also inspired architects and decorators. Among these were several who were soon to achieve an international reputation. They were a small group of men and women, whose talent was controversial but unmistakable, impetuous in their approach to problems and unshakable in their faith in the ideals of the aesthetic movement, which had been formulated as 'art for art's sake' in France in the middle of the nineteenth century and publicized between 1880 and 1890 by

Oscar Wilde. Among them was only one who possessed genius of the highest
order. He was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and his genius burst into sudden
brilliant flame in the nineties and then burned itself out within twenty years. The
other members of the group were George Walton, younger brother of the pain-
ter E.A. Walton, Herbert McNair, the two Macdonald sisters, of whom
Margaret was to marry Mackintosh and Frances was to marry McNair, Talwin
Morris, E.A. Taylor, and others.

n.3

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in 1868. He entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1884, and in 1889 he joined the successful firm of Honeyman and Keppie as a draughtsman. One year later, when he was still only twenty-one, his exceptional talent was already so patent that The British Architect, the most intelligent architectural journal of the time, published a project for a museum which he had done for a student scholarship, and another for a Public Hall,* done for the Alexander Thomson Travelling Scholarship which in fact he won. The plan for the Public Hall is still conventionally classical, but the draughtsman- 4 ship already shows signs of the unmistakable intensity in which Mackintosh was to excel. In 1892 he designed a Chapter House for the Soane Medallion of the 3 Royal Institute of British Architects.* His idiom here was still the current mixture of the Italianate with the Gothic of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

In 1893 he seems to have been promoted from the position of a draughtsman in Honeyman and Keppie to that of a designer. In the design for the new offices of the Glasgow Herald done probably in 1894,* Mackintosh's hand is un- 5, n.5 mistakable in the long curves of the corner turret below its top. These long curves place Mackintosh's position in the years of his beginnings as an architect. Their ancestry is found in certain passages in William Morris's textile designs and certain details in Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and in addition in the new freshness and lightness of weight and colour in Whistler and his friend, the architect Godwin. Add to this the Mackmurdo of the eighties (see pp. 132-7), Beardsley who was to die prematurely in 1898, Voysey whose simple, clean and picturesque houses were just in the mid-nineties getting the appreciation due to them (see pp. 140-51) and, of non-British artists, Jan Toorop whose enigmatic picture The Three Brides was painted in 1892 and reproduced in the first volume of The Studio in 1893.* The Arts and Crafts ingredients are less easily defined. n.6 They go beyond what could be seen illustrated in the magazines, and so it is likely that the young Glasgow designers visited the 1893 Arts and Crafts exhibition in London.

One result of all this was the tower for the Glasgow Herald, and another was some watercolours of the same year, 1894, which were done for an odd book, apparently an unsuccessful magazine of the School of Art. Its only title is April Number, 1894. It contains a short essay by Mackintosh entitled Cabbages, with a