Charles Rennie Mackintosh is famous for the originality of his work as a designer and architect. The height of his career was a relatively brief period in the 1890s and early 1900s when he completed the commissions for which he is now most celebrated, including his architectural masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art. Further success proved elusive, however, and, after many difficult years in England, Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald eventually retreated to France in 1923. At first this was intended as a holiday, but the trip turned into an extended stay until ill-health forced Mackintosh to return to London in 1927 where he died a year later.
Mackintosh left a substantial body of drawings and watercolours, and these demonstrate that he was not only a brilliant designer and architect but also an exceptionally talented artist. In the 1890s he made several watercolours of haunting beauty, fusing elegant botanical forms and mystical figures into subtle, painted patterns. But it is the landscape watercolours made in France in the last years of his life that are his most innovative and fascinating paintings.
These watercolours record the travels of the Mackintosh couple in the Pyrenees and along the Roussillon coast. Their first base was in the ancient spa town of Amélie-les-Bains, but they later spent much of their time in the small fishing village of Port-Vendres, close to the Spanish border. In letters back to Scotland, Margaret described how her husband painted determinedly outdoors, ‘as happy as a sandboy’. Mackintosh was attracted to the intricate patterns of buildings spread across hillsides or stacked up on the coast. He was also drawn to the dramatic geological formations of the Pyrenees, carefully observing the patterns created by rocky outcrops, steep valleys and the walled enclosures and terraces radiating out from ancient farmhouses.
The view shown here is of a remote farm situated on a twisting road that leads south from Amélie-les-Bains, following the spectacular gorge of the river Montdony up into the mountains to the hamlet of Montalba. Typically, Mackintosh has chosen a high viewpoint, looking down on the scenery, omitting any glimpse of sky so that the hillside seems compressed 7into a series of shapes and exaggerated patterns. The lack of growth suggests that this is a winter scene, and the intricate folds and dents of the landscape are shown in sharp relief in a cool, bright sunlight. The colour scheme of soft greens, greys and pale pinks is enlivened by strips of vivid blue shadow. Mackintosh documents the terrain with painstaking care, but the sweep of his washes of watercolour and the dynamic lines formed by the twisting roads and cultivated terraces lend life and vigour to the composition. As in the best of his architecture, his sensitivity to detail is combined with an elegant sense of stylisation. In Mackintosh’s vision the forms of nature and the workings of man come together in an organic and pleasing harmony.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.