Lot Essay
In 1915 Charles Rennie Mackintosh arrived in London from Walberswick in Suffolk, where he had been living since leaving Glasgow in 1913. Walberswick, where Fra Newbery and E A Walton had summer cottages, had provided Mackintosh with the peace and calm he needed to overcome the disappointments of the failure of his own architectural practice in Glasgow. There he turned again to making small sketches of flowers in their natural habitat and it is believed that he received a commission from an Austrian publisher who wished to make a book of them.
Mackintosh's continuing correspondence with his German and Austrian contacts, however, and his practice of making sketches along the coast of Suffolk raised suspicions which eventually led to his arrest as a subversive. Although the charges were quickly dropped, thanks to the intervention of friends such as Patrick Geddes, Mackintosh was encouraged to leave East Anglia and settle in London.
New building was prohibited by war-time regulations and Mackintosh received only one serious architectural commission during the war, for the remodelling of a house in Northampton for W J Basset-Lowke. Both he and Margaret had to turn to more commercial artistic endeavours to maintain their income, the most successful of which was a series of designs for textiles commissioned by the firms of Foxtons and Seftons. Realising that his botanical sketches were probably unsaleable Mackintosh turned to more traditional images of flowers in a series of more finished watercolours which were exhibited widely in the hopes of making a living as a watercolourist. Few, if any, were sold, however.
The freshness and delicacy of the botanical sketches was replaced by a more robust treatment of vases of cut-flowers, usually seen in a domestic environment. These were substantal pictures, the most elaborate Mackintosh had painted since the mid-1880's when he produced a series of works while still a junior draughtsman in the offices of Honeyman & Keppie. Mackintosh's career as a watercolourist is, in fact, closely linked to his productivity as an architect; he is most prolific as a painter in the years before 1896, when he designed the Glasgow School of Art and began to develop a substantial architectural practice, and then again in the period 1914-27 when his architectural output was severely curtailed.
Mackintosh's handling of this new - for him - subject matter was as radical as one would expect. Although usually placed within a three-dimensional setting Mackintosh has emphasised the decorative pattern of the arrangement, usually by introducing a piece of the new textiles which he was designing at this time. Begonias has such a fabric as its backdrop with a table tentatively suggested at the foot of the painting. White Roses and Peonies have a similar arrangement, the abstract patterns of the cloth forming a foil for the naturalistic subject matter. In Anemones Mackintosh shows a piece of cloth reflected in a mirror, which also gives us a glimpse of the studio in which Mackintosh was working. In Yellow Tulips, which is amongst the last of this series of floral watercolours, Mackintosh goes further than in any other in describing the room in Glebe Place in which he worked. There are no photographs of the interiors of the studio which Mackintosh and Margaret used in Chelsea and so this picture is doubly important for the insight it gives us of those rooms. The background is painted with such care that it fights with the flowers for our attention. It pre-dates by a few months the first of the landscapes painted in the South of France but the device used in those pictures of painting the distance in as much detail as the foreground is already in evidence here.
We are most grateful to Roger Billcliffe for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Mackintosh's continuing correspondence with his German and Austrian contacts, however, and his practice of making sketches along the coast of Suffolk raised suspicions which eventually led to his arrest as a subversive. Although the charges were quickly dropped, thanks to the intervention of friends such as Patrick Geddes, Mackintosh was encouraged to leave East Anglia and settle in London.
New building was prohibited by war-time regulations and Mackintosh received only one serious architectural commission during the war, for the remodelling of a house in Northampton for W J Basset-Lowke. Both he and Margaret had to turn to more commercial artistic endeavours to maintain their income, the most successful of which was a series of designs for textiles commissioned by the firms of Foxtons and Seftons. Realising that his botanical sketches were probably unsaleable Mackintosh turned to more traditional images of flowers in a series of more finished watercolours which were exhibited widely in the hopes of making a living as a watercolourist. Few, if any, were sold, however.
The freshness and delicacy of the botanical sketches was replaced by a more robust treatment of vases of cut-flowers, usually seen in a domestic environment. These were substantal pictures, the most elaborate Mackintosh had painted since the mid-1880's when he produced a series of works while still a junior draughtsman in the offices of Honeyman & Keppie. Mackintosh's career as a watercolourist is, in fact, closely linked to his productivity as an architect; he is most prolific as a painter in the years before 1896, when he designed the Glasgow School of Art and began to develop a substantial architectural practice, and then again in the period 1914-27 when his architectural output was severely curtailed.
Mackintosh's handling of this new - for him - subject matter was as radical as one would expect. Although usually placed within a three-dimensional setting Mackintosh has emphasised the decorative pattern of the arrangement, usually by introducing a piece of the new textiles which he was designing at this time. Begonias has such a fabric as its backdrop with a table tentatively suggested at the foot of the painting. White Roses and Peonies have a similar arrangement, the abstract patterns of the cloth forming a foil for the naturalistic subject matter. In Anemones Mackintosh shows a piece of cloth reflected in a mirror, which also gives us a glimpse of the studio in which Mackintosh was working. In Yellow Tulips, which is amongst the last of this series of floral watercolours, Mackintosh goes further than in any other in describing the room in Glebe Place in which he worked. There are no photographs of the interiors of the studio which Mackintosh and Margaret used in Chelsea and so this picture is doubly important for the insight it gives us of those rooms. The background is painted with such care that it fights with the flowers for our attention. It pre-dates by a few months the first of the landscapes painted in the South of France but the device used in those pictures of painting the distance in as much detail as the foreground is already in evidence here.
We are most grateful to Roger Billcliffe for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.