Description
offset lithograph, with facsimile signature
Dimensions
23 x 29cm (9 x 11½in)
Footnote
Provenance:
Christies, London 'The Dr. Thomas Howarth Collection' Thursday, 17th February 1994, Lot 88
Literature:
Ver Sacrum, no. 23, 1901, ill. P. 397
Howarth, Thomas "Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement', London, 2nd ed. 1977, pl. 7C
Neat, Timothy 'Part Seen, Part Imagined: Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald' Edinburgh 1994, ill. p. 30
Note:
The School of Art Club was a student organisation, a social club for current and past pupils at the School and an exhibition venue for shows of recent work. At the end of 1894 its exhibition included work by the Macdonald sisters which led to outcries in the press about 'ghoul-like' works with 'impossible forms, lurid colour, and symbolism that requires many footnotes of explanation. The name 'Spook School', given to the work of The Four, was born.
Mackintosh was never as extreme in his 'Spook School' graphic work as his friends Margaret and Frances Macdonald and Herbert MacNair. The figures in this design are much more classical in feeling (there is an affinity with Michelangelo in other similar work of the period) and the elaborate patterns of hair and vegetation in the background have a more ordered and substantial feel than that in contemporary works by his friends. The central figure may be the earliest appearance of a favourite Mackintosh motif, the Tree of Knowledge. Two other examples are known (The Hunterian, University of Glasgow)