Painter and printmaker Robert George Sang Mackechnie was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1894. While a student at Fettes College boarding school he contracted a debilitating case of rheumatic fever that would affect him for the rest of his life. He switched to a private tutor for his remaining high school years. Once well enough, he attended Oxford and then the Glasgow School of Art, where he focused on drawing and painting and obtained his diploma 1921. He then began exhibiting at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy through 1934.
As a student, Robert lived in the West End area of Glasgow with his girlfriend, painter and fellow GSA student Margaret Helen Barnard. They then moved to London to study linocut printmaking under Claude Flight at the famed Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Robert and Margaret then married and, in 1924, moved briefly to Florence, Italy, where Mackechnie would hold his first solo exhibition.
Around 1927 they returned to London where Mackechnie became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Watercolour Society. In 1927 he joined London’s Seven and Five Society, which, having begun as a strictly conservative and anti-Modernist artists’ group in 1919, was converted by 1924 into a fully Modernist group, holding their first entirely Abstract works show in 1935. In 1934 the Mackechnies moved to Rye, Sussex, dividing their time between there and a small apartment in Positano, Italy, to help with Mackechnie's asthma. Robert Mackechnie died in Rye in 1975.
The Rye Gallery in East Sussex holds an extensive collection of Mackechnie and Margaret Barnard’s work.