CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH (1868-1928)
'LAVANDER, WALBERSWICK', 1915
£37,700
Auction: 11 October 2023 at 10:00 BST
Description
pencil and watercolour, inscribed, dated and signed with initials LAVANDER/ WALBERSWICK/ 1915/ CRM/ MMM, later framed
Dimensions
sheet size 28.8cm x 22.5cm (frame 46.3cm x 38.7cm)
Provenance
Provenance: Acquired by William Meldrum, after the Memorial Exhibition 1933
and by descent to his son, James Meldrum
Given to The Glasgow Art Club by Eva Meldrum, widow of James Meldrum, 1984
Footnote
Note: During a ten-month period in 1914-1915, Charles Rennie Mackintosh created his celebrated series of botanical watercolour studies at Walberswick on the Suffolk coast. Believed to number around 30-40 in total, these works are loved for their meditative, skilful delicacy, and the way they encapsulate the extraordinary marriage of technical and creative vision that Mackintosh possessed. Few beyond Mackintosh are capable of perceiving, much less conveying, both the random beauty and extraordinary symmetry and inherent structural design of the natural world.
By 1915 he had married Margaret Mackintosh, and her initials ’MMM’ begin to appear on his drawings, denoting, like a diary entry, that she was present with him when these sketches were created. ‘Lavander, Walberswick’, the most detailed of the sketches offered here for sale, beautifully illustrates his technical prowess and ever-elegant hand. Creating a sense of texture by highlighting just a few upper leaves with the most delicate of washes, our eye then focuses on the accomplished pencil mark tangle of unfurling leaves towards the base of the stem.
One contemporary source, an article by author Desmond Chapman-Huston, suggests that Mackintosh produced this proliferation of flower studies for a book commissioned by a German publisher, the outbreak of war preventing its publication. It could also have been a deliberate move towards more commercial subject matter as Mackintosh had just quit his architectural practice in Glasgow. He left the recession-bound city under a cloud; his reputation tarnished by rumours of alcoholism. From what we can infer from this beautiful series of drawings, the tranquillity of the coastal village provided him with an opportunity to re-sharpen the clarity of his artistic vision, with many followers holding the Walberswick sketches among his finest work.
This sketch, and the other works by Mackintosh in this sale, belonged to James Meldrum, having come from the collection of his father William Meldrum, Mackintosh’s friend and fellow student at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1880s. James Meldrum notably staged the 1933 Memorial Exhibition of Mackintosh’s work in the MacLellan Galleries on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, along with his friend William Davidson. After James’ death, his widow Eva gifted the vast body of the William Meldrum Collection to the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. The series of works offered here were gifted to the Glasgow Art Club in the 1980s and now appear on the open market for the first time.