Flowers: Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Pamela Robertson, an acknowledged authority on Mackintosh, examines the artist's use of plant forms as decorative and formal sources for his designs in architecture, interiors, textiles, and graphics. She shows the ways in which nature provided lifelong inspiration for his work and analyzes his recurring use of the rose, a design motif which held a special significance as a symbol of art, beauty, and love for both Mackintosh and his artist wife, Margaret Macdonald. In addition, the author looks at Mackintosh's paintings and designs in relation to the work of contemporary symbolists, Japanese floral art, and the European tradition of scientific botanical illustration.
Mackintosh's renowned skills as a draftsman are immediately apparent in his flower paintings. The sixty full-page colorplates presented here reveal early pencil sketchbook drawings done while Mackintosh was an apprentice architect and a student at the Glasgow School of Art, watercolors made on England's North Sea coast in 1914-15, and sophisticated still-life compositions of later years. Reproduced as well are striking floral-based textile designs of the 1920s, abstractions that placed him at the forefront of Britain's avant-garde movement. Photographs of his work in architecture and interiors are also included.