Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Beyond his work in architecture and furniture design, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a talented draughtsman and watercolorist. The Scottish artist leaned more heavily into this medium late in his career, producing numerous landscapes and flower studies. The present lot was sketched in the last few years of his life in Mont Louis, a small town in the heart of the Pyrénées where Mackintosh and his wife Margaret spent their summers. The work demonstrates Mackintosh’s evolution away from the Glasgow Style for which he had become known. Unlike the more stylized designs of his early career, which incorporated elements of both Art Nouveau and the Arts & Crafts movement, his flower studies were more realist and botanically accurate. He achieved a high level of detail in each blossom, outlining them in pencil and filling the composition with light washes of color. The result perfectly encapsulates Mackintosh’s statement: “Art is the Flower. Life is the Green Leaf. Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious more beautiful - more lasting than life itself.”