A RARE watercolour by Charles Rennie Mackintosh has been bought for the nation to celebrate the artist and architect’s 150th anniversary and can be seen by the public for the first time today (Friday).
The Road through the Rocks, a view of a southern French landscape Mackintosh painted between 1926 and 1927, was bought for £65,000 at the auction house Lyon & Turnbull.
It can be seen at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh until mid-January 2018, coinciding wit the 150th anniversary celebrations of the artist’s birth.
The watercolour will hang beside Mont Alba, the Galleries’ only other Mackintosh watercolour, and three Mackintosh watercolours on long loan, including Palalda Pyrénées-Orientales, a view of a hill village.
Mackintosh is internationally renowned as one of the most original and creative architect-designers of the 1890s and early 1900s, but did not achieve such widespread acclaim during his own lifetime.
His career as an architect declined during the First World War and in years immediately afterwards. In 1923 he and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh decided to move to the south of France and concentrate on watercolour painting. Over the next four years Mackintosh produced a series of some 40 watercolours, depicting the mountains, farms, hill towns, ports and flora of the Pyrénées-Orientales and the coast of Roussillon, in the far south west of France. Mackintosh’s French watercolours represent his first sustained landscape and watercolour painting campaign.
The Mackintoshes clearly fell in love with the Roussillon countryside; Margaret wrote after a visit to London in 1924 that, “we came on here – to this lovely rose-coloured land and we were glad to be back again in its warmth and sun”. They initially stayed in the mountain spa town of Amélie-les-Bains, later travelling to the fishing village of Collioure and its near neighbour, the busy working port of Port Vendres. By 1925 they had established a routine of summering in the mountains and spending the rest of the year on the coast at Port Vendres.
Mackintosh worked outdoors, carrying the minimum of equipment, he would scramble across the rocky hillsides in search of the best vantage points, often having to take shelter from the fierce coastal winds of the area. He worked slowly, sometimes spending weeks on a drawing. He wrote, “I go very slow because I have so many problems to solve. I find that each of my drawings has something in them but none of them have everything. This must be remedied”.
The Road Through the Rocks was exhibited at the Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition in Glasgow in 1933 and was later in the collection of Professor Thomas Howarth, an eminent Mackintosh scholar and collector. The National Galleries’ acquisition of The Road Through the Rocks was partly funded by the James Cowan Smith Bequest Fund.
Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “Mackintosh is one of the greatest of all Scotland’s artists and architects and this is a very refined and beautifully composed watercolour, which demonstrates his sophisticated engagement with European landscapes.
“It is especially pleasing that it has been possible to secure such a rare work in good condition for the national collection in time for all the celebrations that will mark the 150th anniversary of his birth.”
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