Painter and printmaker Robert George Sang Mackechnie was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1894. He was a student at The Glasgow School of Art from 1918 to 1921 where he studied drawing and painting, as well as printmaking with noted block print artist Claude Flight. He frequently exhibited with the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy from 1921 to 1934.

As a student, Robert lived in the West End area of Glasgow before moving with his wife and fellow GSA student Margaret Helen Barnard to Florence. They then settled in Rye, East Sussex. Beginning in 1927 he was a member of 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. The Rye Gallery in East Sussex holds an extensive collection of Mackechnie and Margaret Barnard’s work.

Robert Mackechnie died in Rye in 1975.