Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh was, alongside her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the key figures in the emergence of the ‘Glasgow Style’ in the 1890s. Born near Wolverhampton, she settled in Glasgow in the late 1880s. Margaret and her sister Frances enrolled at Glasgow School of Art, where they met Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Herbert MacNair. By the mid-1890s the sisters had established a studio and soon began to collaborate with Mackintosh and MacNair. The four artists quickly cemented their international reputations. Frances Macdonald and MacNair married in 1899, and Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald married in 1900. However, owing to Mackintosh’s deteriorating health health, Margaret spent her time looking after him and so made few works after 1914.
A decorative art style popular in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is characterised by stylised flowing lines of all kinds, most notably the distinctive “whiplash” curve, which was used to illustrate many forms including tendrils, plant stems, flames, waves and flowing hair.
The Glasgow Girls were a group of women artists and designers active in Glasgow at the turn of the twentieth century.