A RARE LANTERN designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms in Glasgow has sold for £609,850 – more than twenty times its original estimate of £20,000 and £30,000.
Mackintosh's lantern was auctioned alongside several other works by the world-famous Scottish designer during the second day of Lyon & Turnbull's two-day long Design Since 1860 sale today (Thursday 15 October) in Edinburgh and online.
Over two days, the premium inclusive total for the Design Since 1860 sale is over £1.6 million.
Believed to be one of only five known complete examples still in existence, lanterns of this design can be seen in photographs from Mackintosh's time, hanging in the White Dining Room in Ingram Street, also known as the Ladies’ Luncheon Room.
The rest belong to the cultural body, Glasgow Life, and were used in the reconstruction of the White Dining Room for a travelling Mackintosh Exhibition organised by Glasgow Museums in 1996.
The auction also included Mackintosh’s striking version of a ladderback chair for Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms.
Expected to sell for between £10,000 and £15,000, this unique chair, made around 1903 from stained oak, fetched £82,800.
The chair is from the collection of the late Glasgow architect, Eric Sloane, who died in 2013. Mr Sloane had a lifelong interest in Glasgow and a deep interest in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Mackintosh had produced ladderback chairs previously. The most recent one prior to this one was made in 1901 for Windyhill, in Kilmacolm, Inverclyde. This house was designed by Mackintosh and furnished by him and his wife, Margaret Macdonald.
Mackintosh’s folio of designs from December 1900 for German architecture and decorative arts publisher Alexander Koch's competition to design a Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover) sold for £6900.
Although Mackintosh's submission was incomplete when entries closed, the judges recognised its originality and awarded him a special prize.
By that time Mackintosh's work had gained international attention following his exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 1900.
Almost a century later in 1999, a modified version of the House for an Art Lover design was built in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow.
John Mackie, Lyon & Turnbull's Head of Design, who was at the rostrum when the Mackintosh items sold, said:
"It is wonderful to see the levels of appreciation for works designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
"We are absolutely delighted with the prices achieved. The lantern is an exceptional object by one of the greatest designers this country has ever produced. One does wonder what Mackintosh would have made of it?"
