A timely life-bite that traces the story of the internationally renowned Scottish artist and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His masterwork, the world-famous Glasgow School of Art building has reached its centenary and the Glasgow Museums’ McLellan Galleries celebrates this visionary with a major retrospective of his work which then travels to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and other museums worldwide. This film looks at his youthful intellectual curiosity, early successes in Glasgow, jealous detractors and loyal allies, his devotion to his artist wife, professional rejection and disillusionment, his consistent perfectionism, and his gathering dependence on alcohol.

Designer Terence Conran and Anthony Jones, President of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and former Rector of The Royal College of Art are amongst the critics who give their views on “the complete designer.” There was a long period when no one had any interest in Mackintosh at all... and now, as we approach the end of the 20th century, he is immensely famous again.

A man ahead of his time, Mackintosh was arguably a precursor firstly of the modernist style and subsequently of the Art Deco movement. The program reveals The Seven Princesses, a Gesso panel by Margaret, discovered last year buried in the cellar of the Austrian capital’s Museum of Applied Arts.

Produced by BBC Scotland