The Life Times And Work Of Charles Rennie Mackintosh

The work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh still influences and inspires much of the art world today. This bo ok captures the vitality of his art, presenting an insight i nto the life of one of the world''s most celebrated designer- architects. '

The work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was ground-breaking in his own time and still inspires and influences much of the art world today. This stunningly illustrated book captures the excitement and vitality of his art, presenting a fascinating insight into the life of one of the world's most celebrated designer-architects. High-quality reproductions of some of his most important and lesser-known works, bring to life one of Britain's greatest artistic eras.

Together with the National Library of Ireland, Architectural Press presents seventy previously unpublished drawings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The identification in the National Library of Ireland of three sketchbooks, from which these drawings have been selected, represents a significant addition to the body of early drawings by Mackintosh. The sketches date from a crucial period in the young man's development, spanning his highly successful student years and the beginnings of his professional career. Each of the three sketchbooks covers an area central to his growth as an artist: the architecture of his native Scotland, an important scholarship journey in Italy and, Mackintosh's first love and greatest influence, the study of plants and growing things. Essentially private, these little known and unique works provide privileged access to significant moments in the artist's intellectual and emotional life. In this book Elaine Grogan attempts to take them out of the library display-case and bring them to life in the hands of the reader. She invites us to look over Mackintosh's shoulder on his early tentative steps towards fulfilment as a creative genius. Connections are traced, both backwards in time to his training and forwards to his great successes and eventual bitter eclipse.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was one of the most intriguing and influential artists of his time. Charles Rennie Mackintosh Masterpieces of Art reveals a selection of some of his most important and popular works, from stained glass pieces and furniture through to architecture, at the same time giving an overview of his life and career. The introduction reveals his journey from early Symbolist watercolours and Japanese-influenced details to his influence on the Vienna Secession and crowning works of architecture such as the Glasgow School of Art. The informed text and beautiful images of key artworks give depth and fuller understanding to create a beautifully rich and enjoyable tribute to the father of the 'Glasgow Style'.

Of the many practitioners of art nouveau in Great Britain, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) has outlasted them all. His work bridged the more ornate style of the later nineteenth century and the forms of international modernism that followed. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he is frequently compared, he is known for so thoroughly integrating art and decoration that the two became inseparable. His work has been honored by a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his designs have proliferated to such an extent that they can be found reproduced in posters, prints, jewelry, and even new buildings. His most important project was the Glasgow School of Art, which still functions as a highly prestigious art school. This glorious building is visited each year by thousands of tourists from around the world. Built over a dozen years, beginning in 1897, the Glasgow School of Art is Mackintosh's greatest and most influential legacy. This completely redesigned and heavily illustrated edition of Mackintosh's Masterwork has been greatly expanded and contains newly discovered material about both the early life of the architect and the formative years in which his plans for the School of Art were executed.

In 1896, Kate Cranston, the pioneer of Glasgow tea rooms in the late nineteenth century, commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh -- who would become one of the Western world's most renowned designers -- to design her tea rooms, and over the next two decades he did so with dazzling inventiveness. (Mackintosh's wife, Margaret, herself an artist, also made important contributions to the interior designs.) A pair of perfectionists, Cranston and Mackintosh opened up a unique, avant-garde artistic world to thousands of ordinary people. Their tea rooms became internationally famous. Taking Tea with Mackintosh illustrates this exciting collaboration with black-and-white historical photographs of the tea rooms and color photographs of their surviving components. In addition, sixteen recipes for traditional tea room cakes, breads, and pastries are supplied, offering the best chance the reader will have to revisit these extraordinary places.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an innovator. He is undoubtedly one of Scotland’s most celebrated architects. His astounding buildings creatively reinterpreted the past and opened the way for the Modern Movement. Architecture was his first love, though he was also a highly accomplished artist and designer of interiors, furniture, metalwork, glass and textiles. In addition his graphic design work, using nature and organic plant forms, made him an early exponent of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. In the later years of his life he produced watercolour paintings of intense power and subtlety. His extraordinary work is still regarded today as innovative and modern, and continues to astonish and delight art lovers everywhere.