• Architect and Designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1868
• Architect and Designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, 1851
• Architect George Washington Maher, 1864

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born at 70 Parson Street, Glasgow, on 7 June 1868 as the fourth out of eleven children and the second son to William McIntosh and Margaret McIntosh. The young Charles attended Reid's Public School and the Allan Glen's Institution. In 1890 Mackintosh was the second winner of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship, set up for the "furtherance of the study of ancient classic architecture, with special reference to the principles illustrated in Mr. Thomson’s works." Upon his return, he resumed with the Honeyman and Keppie architectural practice where he commenced his first grand architectural project, the Glasgow Herald Building, in 1899.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh met fellow artist Margaret MacDonald at the Glasgow School of Art. Members of the collaborative group known as “The Four”, the two married in 1900. After several successful building designs, Mackintosh became a partner of Honeyman and Keppie in 1907 his last major architectural commission. When economic hardships were causing many architectural practices to close, he resigned from Honeyman and Keppie in 1913 and attempted to open his own practice. Unable to sustain his office, Mackintosh and his wife took an extended holiday in Suffolk where he created many floral watercolors. Upon return a year later, the Mackintoshes moved to London where Charles continued to paint and create textile designs. In 1916, Mackintosh received a commission to redesign the home of W.J. Bassett - Lowke. This undertaking would be his last architectural and interior design project.

Due to financial hardship, the Mackintoshes moved in 1923 to Port - Vendres, a Mediterranean coastal town in southern France with a warm climate that was a comparably cheaper location in which to live. During this peaceful phase of his life, Charles Rennie Mackintosh created a large portfolio of architecture and landscape watercolor paintings. The couple remained in France for two years, before being forced to return to London in 1927 due to illness.

That year, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was diagnosed with throat and tongue cancer. A brief recovery prompted him to leave the hospital and convalesce at home for a few months. Necessity resulted in Mackintosh being admitted to a nursing home where he died on 10 December 1928 at the age of 60. He is buried in Golders Green Crematorium in London.

Mackintosh lived most of his life in the city of Glasgow. Located on the banks of the River Clyde, during the Industrial Revolution, the city had one of the greatest production centers of heavy engineering and shipbuilding in the world. As the city grew and prospered, a faster response to the high demand for consumer goods and arts was necessary. Industrialized, mass produced items started to gain popularity. Along with the Industrial Revolution, Asian style and emerging modernist ideas also influenced Mackintosh's designs. When the Japanese isolationist regime softened, they opened themselves to globalization resulting in notable Japanese influence around the world. Glasgow’s link with the eastern country became particularly close with shipyards building at the River Clyde being exposed to Japanese navy and training engineers. Japanese design became more accessible and gained great popularity. In fact, it became so popular and so incessantly appropriated and reproduced by Western artists, that the Western World's fascination and preoccupation with Japanese art coined the new term, Japonism or Japonisme.

This style was admired by Mackintosh because of: its restraint and economy of means rather than ostentatious accumulation; its simple forms and natural materials rather than elaboration and artifice; the use of texture and light and shadow rather than pattern and ornament. In the old western style furniture was seen as ornament that displayed the wealth of its owner and the value of the piece was established according to the length of time spent creating it. In the Japanese arts furniture and design focused on the quality of the space, which was meant to evoke a calming and organic feeling to the interior.

At the same time a new philosophy concerned with creating functional and practical design was emerging throughout Europe: the so-called "modernist ideas". The main concept of the Modernist movement was to develop innovative ideas and new technology: design concerned with the present and the future, rather than with history and tradition. Heavy ornamentation and inherited styles were discarded. Even though Mackintosh became known as the ‘pioneer’ of the movement, his designs were far removed from the bleak utilitarianism of Modernism. His concern was to build around the needs of people: people seen, not as masses, but as individuals who needed not a machine for living in but a work of art. Mackintosh took his inspiration from his Scottish upbringing and blended them with the flourish of Art Nouveau and the simplicity of Japanese forms.

While working in architecture, Charles Rennie Mackintosh developed his own style: a contrast between strong right angles and floral inspired decorative motifs with subtle curves, e.g., the Mackintosh Rose motif, along with some references to traditional Scottish architecture. The project that helped make his international reputation was the Glasgow School of Art (1897 – 1909). During the early stages of the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh also completed the Queen’s Cross Church project in Maryhill, Glasgow. This is considered to be one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh most mysterious projects. It is the only church by the Glasgow born artist to be built and is now the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society headquarters. Like his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, Mackintosh's architectural designs often included extensive specifications for the detailing, decoration and furnishing of his buildings. The majority if not all of this detailing and significant contributions to his architectural drawings were designed and detailed by his wife Margaret Macdonald whom Charles had met when they both attended the Glasgow School of Art. His work was shown at the Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900. Mackintosh’s architectural career was a relatively short one, but of significant quality and impact. All his major commissions were between 1896 and 1906, where he designed private homes, commercial buildings, interior renovations and churches.

Although moderately popular (for a period) in his native Scotland, most of Mackintosh's more ambitious designs were not built. Designs for various buildings for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition were not constructed, neither was his "Haus eines Kunstfreundes" (Art Lover's House) of the same year. He competed in the 1903 design competition for Liverpool Cathedral, but failed to gain a place on the shortlist (the winner was Giles Gilbert Scott).

The House for An Art Lover (1901) was built after his death in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow (1989 – 1996).

An Artist's Cottage and Studio (1901), known as The Artist's Cottage, was completed at Farr by Inverness in 1992. The architect was Robert Hamilton Macintyre acting for Dr and Mrs Peter Tovell.

The first of the unexecuted Gate Lodge, Auchinbothie (1901) sketches was realized as a mirrored pair of gatehouses to either side of the Achnabechan and The Artist's Cottage drives, also at Farr by Inverness. Known as North House and South House, these were completed 1995-7.

Mackintosh's architectural output was small, but he did influence European design. Popular in Austria and Germany, his work received acclaim when it was shown at the Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900. It was also exhibited in Budapest, Munich, Dresden, Venice and Moscow.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh attended evening classes in art at the Glasgow School of Art. It was at these classes that he first met his future wife Margaret MacDonald, her sister Frances MacDonald, and Herbert MacNair who was also a fellow apprentice with Mackintosh at Honeyman and Keppie. MacNair and Frances would also marry. These close companions would later be known as the collaborative group “The Four”, prominent members of the "Glasgow School" movement.

This group of artists exhibited in Glasgow, London and Vienna, and these exhibitions helped establish Mackintosh's reputation. The so-called "Glasgow" style was exhibited in Europe and influenced the Viennese Art Nouveau movement known as Sezessionstil (in English, the Vienna Secession) around 1900. Mackintosh also worked in interior design, furniture, textiles and metalwork. Much of this work combines Mackintosh's own designs with those of his wife, whose flowing, floral style complemented his more formal, rectilinear work.

Later in life, disillusioned with architecture, Mackintosh worked largely as a watercolorist, painting numerous landscapes and flower studies (often in collaboration with Margaret, with whose style Mackintosh's own gradually converged) in the Suffolk village of Walberswick (to which the pair moved in 1914), where he was briefly arrested as amid accusations of being a German spy in 1915. By 1923, he had entirely abandoned architecture and design and moved to the south of France with Margaret where he concentrated on watercolor painting. He was interested in the relationships between man - made and naturally occurring landscapes. Many of his paintings depict Port Vendres, a small port near the Spanish border, and the nearby landscapes.

Mackintosh's designs gained in popularity in the decades following his death. His House for an Art Lover was finally built in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park in 1996, and the University of Glasgow (which owns the majority of his watercolor work) rebuilt the interiors of a terraced house Mackintosh had designed, and furnished it with his and Margaret's work (it is part of the University's Hunterian Museum). The Glasgow School of Art building (now renamed "The Mackintosh Building") is regularly cited by architectural critics as among the very finest buildings in the UK. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society tries to encourage a greater awareness of the work of Mackintosh as an important architect, artist and designer. The rediscovery of Mackintosh as a significant figure in design is attributed by some to the designation of Glasgow as European City of Culture in 1990, and the exhibition of his work which accompanied the year long festival. His enduring popularity since then has been fueled by further exhibitions and the many books and other memorabilia which have illustrated various aspects of his life and work. This revival of public interest in Mackintosh has, in turn, led to the refurbishing and opening of further buildings to the public, such as the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow and Derngate, Northampton.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held a major retrospective exhibition of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's works from 21 November 1996 to 16 February 1997. In conjunction with that exhibit, there were lectures and a symposium by major scholars, including Pamela Robertson of the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow art gallery owner Roger Billcliffe, and architect J. Stewart Johnson, and screening of documentary films about Mackintosh.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was to be commemorated on a new series of banknotes issued by the Clydesdale Bank in 2009; his image appeared on the new issue of £100 notes.

Mackmurdo was the son of a wealthy chemical manufacturer. He was educated at Felsted School, and was first trained under the architect T. Chatfield Clarke, from whom he claimed to have learned nothing. Then, in 1869, he became an assistant to the Gothic Revival architect James Brooks. In 1873, he visited John Ruskin's School of Drawing, and accompanied Ruskin to Italy in 1874. He stayed on to study in Florence for a while; despite the influence of Ruskin, the Italian architecture he was most impressed by was that of the Renaissance. That same year, Mackmurdo opened his own architectural practice at 28, Southampton Street, in London.

In 1882, Mackmurdo founded the Century Guild of Artists. Other members included Selwyn Image, Herbert Horne, Clement Heaton and Ruskin's protegee, the sculptor Benjamin Creswick. It was one of the more successful craft guilds of its time. It offered complete furnishing of homes and buildings, and its artists were encouraged to participate in production as well as design; Mackmurdo himself mastered several crafts, including metalworking and cabinet making.

In 1884, the guild showed a display in the form of a music room at the Health Exhibition in London; the stand was shown, with variations, at subsequent exhibitions in Manchester and Liverpool. It incorporated two of Mackmurdo's favorite motifs. One was foliage twisted into sinuous curves. Nikolaus Pevsner described Mackmurdo's use of such foliage on the title page of the designer's own Wren's City Churches (1883) as "the first work of art nouveau which can be traced", identifying its main influences as Rosetti and Burne - Jones and ultimately, through them, William Blake.

The second motif was the use of thin square columns, topped with flat squares instead of capitals. These columns influenced the furniture designs of C.F.A. Voysey, and, through him, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackmurdo used them architecturally on his own house at 8 Private Road, Enfield, (1887), and on a house for the artist Mortimer Menpes, at 25 Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea (1893 - 1894), where he incorporated them into a kind of Queen Anne style.

Maher was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1916.

George Maher was born in Mill Creek, West Virginia, but moved as a small boy with his family to New Albany, Indiana, where he attended public elementary school. While in his early teens, due to continuing financial pressures, the family moved to Chicago.

At the age of 13 he was apprenticed at the Chicago architectural firm of Augustus Bauer and Henry Hill. In 1887 he joined the office of architect Joseph L. Silsbee as a draftsman where he worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and George Grant Elmslie. In 1888 Maher formed a partnership with Charles Corwin which lasted for only a brief time before he began his own practice.

Maher married Elizabeth Brooks in 1893 and moved to Kenilworth, Illinois. His own home, built there in 1893, which was only one of about 40 homes he designed in Kenilworth. Along with the homes he also designed the entrance to the village as well as a number of other public embellishments. In addition to Kenilworth, one of the largest concentrations of his work is along Hutchinson Street, on Chicago's North Side lakefront.

From the start of his career, Maher wrote about his views on architecture and was active in organizations interested in exploring new ideas in architecture and design. In 1887 Inland Architect published a paper he had written titled “Originality in American Architecture,” one of the first of many he would write. In 1895 an interest in the English Arts and Crafts Movement led him to become one of the founding members of The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. During his career, he was involved as a leading figure in the meetings and exhibitions of the Chicago Architectural Club, a group that was at the center of activity of the Prairie movement in Chicago.

Maher’s early work during the 1890s reflected the influence of Silsbee and H.H. Richardson as well as Louis Sullivan and others of the Chicago School.

In 1893 Maher met J.L. Cochran who was developing the community of Edgewater which would ultimately become part of Chicago. During the next several years Maher designed a series of houses for Cochran which helped establish Maher's career and reputation.

Commissioned in 1897, one of Maher's most important designs is the John Farson House in Oak Park, also known as Pleasant Home. In this house, Maher synthesized his own version of what would ultimately come to be called the Prairie School style of architecture. One of the earliest Prairie style buildings, its design concept proved to be extremely influential in its time and was widely copied throughout the Midwest.

Over the years Maher designed numerous houses for clients ranging from middle class businessmen to wealthy society figures. The success of the Farson house led to a number of large commissions. Among his clients was James A. Patten for whom he built a large mansion in 1901. Patten was also responsible for getting Maher the commission to design the original Patten Gymnasium at Northwestern University where Maher also designed the Swift Hall of Engineering. Also in 1901, Maher was hired to remodel the Nickerson House which currently houses the Driehaus Muesum. These were followed by the design of a large estate for Harry Rubens that was built in Glencoe, Illinois, in 1903. Jens Jensen designed the landscaping for the Rubens estate. Other projects include the P.J. King House from 1901, the Rath House in 1907, and the Colvin House in 1909, all of which have been designated Chicago Landmarks by the city.

By the time of the Farson House commission, Maher was one of the first of the Prairie Style architects to have developed a personal style. By 1897, with almost a full decade behind him, his career was well established. With Wright’s Prairie houses still several years in the future, Maher's version of the Prairie style came at a time when Louis Sullivan’s work was still the dominant influence for the developing group of architects. While many of the others worked directly for Wright or Sullivan, Maher never did which may be part of the reason his design work would follow a more independent path throughout his career.

Around 1904 Maher’s designs started to show more of his interest in ideas derived from contemporary European design, especially the English Arts and Crafts movement and the Vienna Secession. Assimilating these influences into concepts of his own, he created designs that set his work apart at a time when Wright’s work was becoming increasingly influential among his contemporaries. Among these projects was the Corbin House in 1904 followed by houses such as the Erwin House (1905) , the Lackner House (1905) and the Schultz House (1907).

As part of his design philosophy Maher developed what he call Motif - Rhythm theory in an attempt to produce a design unity throughout the building and its interior. This involved using a decorative element, often a local flower, a geometric shape, or a combination of the two which would be used repeatedly throughout the design to “bind the design together.” At “Rockledge”, the 12,000 square foot (1,100 m²) summer house he designed in 1911 for Ernest and Grace King in Homer, Minnesota, Maher was also commissioned to design the interior furnishings for the house allowing him to use the Motif - Rhythm theory to the fullest extent possible. Ultimately the house fell into disuse but before the house was demolished the furniture, clocks, lamps, rugs, even the tableware that Maher had designed, were sold with many pieces ending up in various museum collections as examples of Arts and Crafts design.

While Maher is known for his residential work, he also designed commercial and institutional buildings. His client James Patten was responsible for getting Maher the commission to design the most well known of these, the original Patten Gymnasium (1908 – 09) at Northwestern University where Maher also designed the Swift Hall of Engineering (1908). Other notable projects were several buildings for the J.R. Watkins Medical Company (1911) including their administrative headquarters in Winona, Minnesota. These were followed by the Winona Saving Bank which was designed and built in 1914 - 16.

The momentum of the Prairie School movement began to rapidly decline in the mid teens as clients' tastes and interests changed, forcing many of its followers to turn in other directions. For some, including Maher, it meant increasing pressure to design in the eclectic styles then in vogue.

Throughout his career Maher was involved in organizations seeking to improve the architecture profession. In addition to the Chicago Architectural Club, he was active in the state chapter of the American Institute of Architects serving as state chapter president in 1918. Just as Maher had worked for Silsbee whose office had produced a number of architects that went on to have distinguished careers, Maher’s office also produced several notable architects including his son Phillip Brooks Maher and Robert Seyfarth.

After his World War l, his son joined the office as a partner and the firm became known as “George W. Maher & Son”. In the early 1920s Maher designed multiple buildings and landscapes throughout the Chicago area and in Gary, Indiana, where the firm produced a number of projects. His final work was commissioned by the Gary Heat, Light, and Water Company of Gary, Indiana. They requested him to design a new warehouse. This design embodied the last set of drawings to hold his name and architectural registration.

By the time of his death he had designed over 270 projects; from houses to parks to public buildings. In the fall of 1926 after several years of declining health, including hospitalization for depression in 1924 - 25, George W. Maher took his own life at the age of 61.