Charles Rennie Mackintosh's finest work dates from about a dozen intensely creative years around 1900. His buildings in Glasgow, and especially his craggy masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art, are more complex and playful than anything in Britain at that time. His interiors, many of them designed in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, are both spare and sensuous, creating a world of heightened aesthetic sensibility.

Finally, during the 1920s, he painted a series of watercolours which are as original as anything he had done before. Since his death, Mackintosh has been lauded as a pioneer of the Modern Movement and as a master of Art Nouveau. This book, with illustrations that include specially prepared plans and sections, takes a clear-eyed view of Mackintosh and his achievement, stripping away the myths to reveal a designer of extraordinary sophistication and inventiveness.