A HANGING SHADE, CIRCA 1900

Around 1900, Charles Rennie Mackintosh began to focus more on interior design than on architecture. In advance of his marriage to Margaret MacDonald in August 1900, he devised a decorative scheme for their new home at No. 120 Main Street, Glasgow. The colour palette employed was restricted to grey, white and cream with purple key-notes in the frieze rail, bookcase and light-fittings. There were twelve such lights hung in the drawing room in configurations of four. They also featured in the bedroom but in this instance as single fittings. Originally designed as gas lights, they have subsequently been adapted for electricity. Similar lights were also hung in the White Room of the Ingram Street Tea Rooms designed in the same year. The sharp cubic form was surmounted by a spherical-cap and softened by the more naturalistic stylised tear-drop or leaf motif. The light was radically modern and a prime example of the geometric designs that were to so influence the Viennese Secession in the early years of the 20th Century.