This story introduces the work of the celebrated architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. And it introduces the concept of the pioneering design of the Glasgow Style.
It compares Mackintosh’s designs with those of his Victorian predecessors and modern contemporaries. And it looks at their influences and interests, and presents the key motifs that define the style.
Key works from our internationally-important holdings demonstrate how widely and diversely these motifs were employed.
Between around 1890–1920, Glasgow was the home of an art and design movement now called The Glasgow Style.
The Glasgow Style was not a movement with an ideological framework but it was, in part, a result of a general intellectual and cultural revival in Glasgow.
It is marked as being the Scottish contemporary of Continental Art Nouveau and the English Arts and Crafts movement by:
- the interest in traditional techniques, and
- the use of strong clean abstract forms, shapes and lines.
It rejected the dark colour palette and crowded, ornate taste of the earlier Victorian period. And it created interiors, furniture and everyday items for a new, modern lifestyle at the dawn of the twentieth century.