When Charles Rennie Mackintosh won the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship in 1890, this was only his latest prize - if the most prestigious - among several gained over the previous five years. From the outset of his student life, he had won numerous prizes and commendations at Glasgow School of Art:
At the end of his first session (1884-5) he received a prize for ‘Painting and Ornament and Monochrome from the Flat’. He also passed second-grade examinations in freehand drawing modelling, and geometry (‘excellent’). In the following year (1885-6), he was commended in the advanced section, awarded a prize, and given a free studentship. His studies in sepia from the cast showed ‘both care and fidelity’1.
Mackintosh was only an evening student at the School of Art: throughout this time, he was working as an architectural apprentice with John Hutchison out of an office situated at the back of John’s brother’s furniture shop in 107 St Vincent Street.
In 1887, Mackintosh won the Glasgow Institute of Architects’ Book Prize for the best set of building construction lecture notes and the second prize of £2. 10s. for measured drawings of David Hamilton’s Royal Exchange. He thus won prizes in two out of the three newly-established categories offered by the GIA (the third being ‘drawings of architectural ornament from the cast’).
When the School of Arts entered its students’ work in the 1888 annual competition held in South Kensington, Mackintosh was awarded a bronze medal for the Design of a Mountain Chapel’. That year he won the GIA prize for the best set of three monthly designs and a £1 prize for a ‘Townhouse in a Terrace’, despite reservations by the judges about their obvious originality, rather than being based on ‘study of past work’.
In 1889 came another Book Prize, one of the national Queen’s Prizes, for the design of a presbyterian church (for which he then shared first prize with John G Gillespie when entered into a GIA competition). That year,
Mackintosh was awarded a prize in architectural design (Highest Grade), a free studentship (First Class Honours), a certificate and bronze medal for building construction, a first-class certificate and prize in architectural design, and second-class certificates in elementary modelling and painting and monochrome. In addition to the Glasgow Institute’s design prize, he received a prize (15s.) for sketching ornament from the cast and £1. 10s. for the best set of three monthly drawings2.
On completion of his apprenticeship with Hutchison, Mackintosh joined the newly-formed partnership of John Honeyman and John Keppie as a draughtsman, with his name first appearing in the company’s accounts for July 1889, when a payment of £5 was recorded.
Keppie had until recently been chief draughtsman in Campbell Douglas & Sellars; following Sellars’ early death in October 1888, Keppie had completed his Anderson College of Medicine in Dumbarton Road, and then designed his headstone.
By mid-1890, Mackintosh’s first executed design was being completed, a pair of semi-detached houses for his uncle, William Hamilton, at 120-22 (now 140-22) Balgrayhill Road (below). They neither reach back to Thomson or forward to anything else (discounting, perhaps, the ground floor windows), so may reflect his uncle’s preferences as much as anything else.
A year after joining Honeyman & Keppie, Mackintosh was named the winner of the triennial Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship3, worth £60, and equivalent to around two years’ income. The competition was ‘for the best original design of a public hall to accommodate 1,000 persons (seated) with suitable committee rooms, the design to be in the Early Classic style, and for an isolated site’. More specially, the Studentship was awarded
for the furtherance of the study of ancient classic architecture, as practised prior to the commencement of the third century of the Christian era, and with special reference to the principles illustrated in the works of the late Alexander Thomson4.
The terms of the Trust setting up the Studentship were quite specific:
No person shall be eligible who is less than eighteen or more than twenty-five years of age, or who is not of approved moral character, or who does not bona fide intend to devote himself to the profession of an architect.
Entrants had also to be living in the UK, had to complete their travels before the next competition, and would receive the funds in two equal instalments,
…the second when he has submitted to [the trustees] in the form of drawings and sketches, with descriptive notes, satisfactory evidence of his having made due improvement of his travels during at least three months.
At the same time as winning the Thomson Studentship, Mackintosh had work accepted for the RIBA Scholarship in Architecture, but the award was withheld since he was the only entrant.
For his competition entry, Mackintosh ‘adopted the Ionic order and produced a symmetrical colonnaded building set on a high rusticated base’, with views (such as the one at the head of this article, showing the rear of the building) published in The British Architect in 1890.
Thomas Howarth provides a front elevation and plans (below):
Mackintosh’s competition drawings, together with a design for a Science and Art Museum (below), were later submitted to South Kensington; in late 1891, Mackintosh received the National Silver medal, but some disliked the Museum design in particular.
The examiners described it as having ‘many good points, but the effect of the larger features above smaller ones is disagreeable’, while a writer to The Builder complained,
We can only observe that is the department [of Science and Art] can secure no higher standard than the things to which they award prizes, they had better give up teaching architecture at all. There is a silver medal given to a Glasgow student, for instance, for a design for a classic building, which is bad in every way, clumsy and heavy in design and defective in drawing5.
A more recent writer describes the Thomson Studentship design as
not of much importance… Mackintosh’s solution is a competent though entirely typical student exercise in Beaux Arts planning encased in a slightly uncertain Scottish variant on Greek revival vocabulary6.
But who was Mackintosh drawing on? He might be employing Classical principles, but he seems to be adhering more to the recently deceased James Sellars than to ‘Greek’ Thomson. This includes the grouping of statuary: John Mossman was a trustee in 1887, and although he died four days before Mackintosh’s success was published, he may well have still been involved in judging entries earlier in the year. Mossman had been responsible for the four statuary groups outside Sellars’ St Andrew’s Halls, as they were now called, which included his friend, the late Alexander Thomson, representing Architecture.
Without seeing the plans at scale, it is difficult to where Mackintosh is drawing ideas from: David Hamilton for the free-standing statues across the front of the Museum? William Young’s successful Glasgow Municipal Buildings competition entry for both buildings’ major pediments? One thing is clear, even at this scale: he was drawing on Sellars’ lamp standards (below), as manufactured by Macfarlane and used by him for St Andrew’s Halls, the New Club, and Kelvinside Academy for the Thomson entry. The use of banded stonework and simple, deep-set windows suggest more connections.
James Sellars and John James Burnet were the two main architects Mackintosh’s admitted to admiring. Ten year after Sellars’ death, Mackintosh created a perspective drawing for the 1901 International Exhibition. Comparing this and Sellars’ Industrial Hall for its predecessor exhibition (below):
[Mackintosh’s] principal towers… were similar in form and proportion to Sellars’ towers - so much so, in fact, that it would appear that the architect had traced them from the original and merely omitted Sellars’ oriental trimmings.
That said, the successful design, by James Miller, followed the same approach, of
a cupola flanked by four towers differing only in detail; Sellars’ in a restrained Saracenic style, and Miller’s in flamboyant Spanish Renaissance. As usual Mackintosh’s scheme cannot be placed in any of the convenient pigeon-holes of style; it is singularly free from ornamentation and, compared to Miller’s design, positively austere.
T Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement, London, 1952, from which this section on prizes is drawn.
ibid.
Building News, 26 Sep 1890
Extract from the Registered Deed of Trust for the 1887 Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship, and for the quotations below
This and the quote above from Howarth; The Builder, 1 Aug 1891
R Macleod, Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Architect and Artist, London 1983