About The Four

The group known as ‘The Four’ comprised Charles Rennie Mackintosh, James Herbert McNair (1868 - 1955), and the sisters, Margaret Macdonald (1864 - 1933) and Frances Macdonald (1873 - 1921). The artists met as young students at Glasgow School of Art in the mid 1890s. Mackintosh and McNair were close friends and fellow apprentice architects in the Glasgow practice of Honeyman and Keppie, and the sisters were day students at Glasgow School of Art. They formed an informal creative alliance which produced innovative and at times controversial graphics and decorative art designs which made an important contribution to the development and recognition of a distinctive ‘Glasgow Style’. In 1899 McNair and Frances Macdonald married and moved to Liverpool. Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald married the following year, remaining in Glasgow till 1914.