CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH
THE COMPLETE FURNITURE, FURNITURE DRAWINGS
& INTERIOR DESIGNS
Roger Billcliffe
Roger Billcliffe: CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH: THE COMPLETE FURNITURE, FURNITURE DRAWINGS & INTERIOR DESIGNS. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986. Third edition. Quarto. Black cloth titled in silver. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Lavendar endpapers. 272 pp. 20 color plates. 800 black and white illustrations. Publishers plain cardboard slipcase. Six pieces of Mackintosh exhibition/tour ephemera laid in. Pristine: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket housed in the plain Publishers cardboard slipcase.
10 x 13.5 hardcover book with 272 pages with over 800 black and white images including 20 color plates. This third edition of Roger Billcliffe’s ground-breaking catalogue raisonné of the furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh features updated text throughout to take account of the numerous discoveries and developments in Mackintosh scholarship. For Mackintosh, who saw architecture as the art that encompassed all the other visual arts, the design of furniture and interiors formed a vital part of his oeuvre. The exhibition rooms, interiors and even single pieces of furniture, which were so eagerly sought after by his European clients and colleagues, were designed with the same care as his major architectural commissions. In a working life of only twenty-five years, Mackintosh designed over 300 pieces of furniture, a number that seems all the more impressive given that the majority were produced in the periods 1897-1905 and 1916-1918.
After an introduction in which Billcliffe perceptively analyses Mackintosh’s career and scholarly interpretations of it, the book is arranged as a complete chronological catalogue of his work as a furniture designer. Mackintosh’s standing as one of the key figures in design at the beginning of the 20th century and the role of Margaret Macdonald – recently elevated by some writers to the position of collaborator and co-designer of several projects – is thoroughly examined and brought up to date. As well as the entries on individual designs and pieces, the catalogue includes essays on all Mackintosh’s major commissions for interiors and on his designs in general at specific periods of his career. Contemporary photographs are used extensively to show interiors (many of them now destroyed) as they were at the time of their completion. Pieces of furniture which cannot be traced are listed by reference to the job books that record the details of designs by Mackintosh or the firms of which he was a member. This is the only comprehensive work on the furniture of the most important British designer and architect since Robert Adam. An impressive and stimulating work of scholarship, this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in twentieth-century design, whether in historical, aesthetic or purely practical terms. It is acknowledged as the definitive work on a designer of world renown and influence.
Perhaps Scotland's most famous architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in Glasgow in 1868. A pioneer of modernism the architect, artist and designer created his own aesthetic by blending numerous influences from art nouveau to Asian painting. During his lifetime Mackintosh had only a small number of buildings realised, with the majority of his major projects including the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House and Willow Tea Rooms all being built before he turned forty. In later life he stopped practicing architecture altogether due to a lack of commissions, and concentrated on painting. Mackintosh died of cancer aged 60 in 1928.
While Mackintosh is best know for his architectural works, including the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House and House for an Art Lover, he also designed much of their decor and furnishings.
One of the most important figures in Mackintosh's career was Catherine Cranston – a patron who allowed him to showcase his talent as a designer and was appreciative of his all-encompassing approach.Cranston was a Glasgow-based businesswoman with a passion for the arts, who came up with the idea of opening a series of tea rooms in the city with artistic interiors.
Having already established a successful tea room on Argyle Street, she invited Mackintosh to work alongside architect and designer George Walton on the interiors of a new premises in Buchanan Street in 1896.The following year, Mackintosh and Walton collaborated again on the design of Cranston's Argyle Street Tea Rooms, with Mackintosh focusing on the furnishings. It was the first major private commission of his career and an opportunity to implement some of his ideas regarding the use of furniture to create a feeling of enclosure and spatial separation within a room.
One of the pieces Mackintosh designed for the project was a high-backed chair for the Luncheon Room that aimed to held provide a more intimate dining experience for diners. The Argyle Chair features long, tapering uprights that intersected with an enlarged oval headrest. The stylised shape of a swallow in flight was carved out of the headrest to lend it an artistic and emblematic quality.The chair's combination of simple and sculptural elements with an emphasis on natural forms echoed the ideas propounded by the Arts and Crafts movement, of which Mackintosh was an admirer. Its extraordinary back legs are a complex piece of woodworking, with a form that starts off square at the base before curving and gradually tapering to become circular at the top.
The unusual height of the chairs meant that they formed a screen around the tables, creating the feeling of a room within a room. It was a technique that Mackintosh would explore and refine further in several of his later furniture designs. In 1900, the Argyle Chair was exhibited at the Eighth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession in Austria, where Mackintosh's work was held in high regard and strongly influenced the work of the artists, architects and designers of the Wiener Werkstatte community.
Mackintosh would go on to design the furniture and interiors for several more of Cranston's premises, including the iconic Willow Tea Rooms. The pair remained good friends and he would eventually create the interiors for her Hill House in 1904.