THOMAS CALLANDER CAMPBELL MACKIE (SCOTTISH 1886 - 1952),
AROS, ISLE OF MULL
oil on canvas, signed
image size 36cm x 46cm, overall size 51cm x 61cm
Framed and under glass.
Note: Thomas Callander Campbell Mackie was born at Helensburgh on 17 June 1886 and educated at Larchfield School, Helensburgh. He was articled to Alexander Nisbet Paterson c. 1902-7 and was at some point an assistant to William Leiper, studying at the Glasgow School of Architecture under Eugène Bourdon from c.1904 and contributing an article to 'Vista' in 1908. At the School, he was regarded as 'most promising of architect students, gifted with outstanding imagination of unusual quality and supreme draughtsmanship'. In the years before the First World War, he designed ship interiors for Alexander Stephen of Linthouse and made a visit to Venice. Mackie was unfit for military service and spent the First World War with the Red Cross. At the end of it, he designed memorials for Martyns of Cheltenham, but in 1920 he was appointed Head of the School of Design at Glasgow School of Art, Throughout the inter-war years he travelled extensively in France, practising chiefly as a painter in oil and pastel and as a lithographer and etcher rather than an architect. In the early 1930s, he moved house from Helensburgh to Moorcroft, Milngavie, where he died on August 17 1952, two years after his retirement from Glasgow School of Art. His friend Alfred G Lochhead organised a memorial exhibition of his work. Lochhead wrote of him 'he was a man apart, in having an inward something, call it an intensely Celtic flame or what you will, which gave him an awareness of beauty which was exceptionally keen.' Campbell Mackie's work is held in several Scottish public collections including Glasgow Museums & Galleries.