Charles Rennie Mackintosh trained as an apprentice in Glasgow and rose inside the office of Honeyman & Keppie, where he was still a salaried assistant when the practice won the competition for the Glasgow School of Art in 1896. Everything he is remembered for was built in roughly twenty years and almost all of it within a few miles of the Clyde: the School of Art, Scotland Street School, Queen's Cross Church, the Willow Tea Rooms, and the Hill House at Helensburgh. He worked with his wife Margaret Macdonald, whose gesso panels and decorative schemes belong to the same invention as the buildings. The combination is unusual — hard, almost bleak Scottish baronial masonry outside, and inside a lyrical interior of white paint, attenuated verticals and stylised rose motifs. Commissions dried up after 1913; he spent his last years painting watercolours in France.
