September Monthly Challenge

Margaret Macdonald (1864 – 1933)
Born Margaret Macdonald, at Tipton, near Wolverhampton, her father was a colliery manager and engineer. Margaret and her younger sister Frances both attended the Orme Girls’ School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. In the 1881 census Margaret, aged 16, was said to be a scholar. By 1890 the family had settled in Glasgow and Margaret and her sister, Frances Macdonald, enrolled as students at the Glasgow School of Art. There she worked in a variety of media, including metalwork, embroidery, and textiles. She was first a collaborator with her sister, and later with her husband, the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Her most dynamic works are large gesso panels made for the interiors that she designed with Mackintosh, such as tearooms and private residences.
Together with her husband, her sister, and Herbert MacNair, she was one of the most influential members of the loose collective of the Glasgow School known as “The Four”. She exhibited with Mackintosh at the 1900 Vienna Secession, where she was arguably an influence on the Secessionists Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann.
Macdonald was celebrated in her time by many of her peers, including her husband who once wrote in a letter to Margaret “Remember, you are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work …”; and reportedly “Margaret has genius, I have only talent.” It is not known exactly which of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s works Margaret was involved with (or the extent to which she worked on them) but she is credited with being an important part of her husband’s figurative, symbolic interior designs. Many of these were executed at the early part of the twentieth century; and include the Rose Boudoir at the International Exhibition at Turin in 1903, the designs for House for an Art Lover in 1900, and the Willow Tea Rooms in 1902. Poor health cut short Margaret’s career and, as far as is known, she produced no work after 1921. She died in 1933, five years after her husband.