The Scottish architect, designer, and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh numbers amongst the most innovative and industrious designers in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. His furniture designs, which he often completed working closely together with his wife, Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, were carried out in connection with specific commissions and projects. They were explicitly not designed for an anonymous market or industrial-scale production. Rather, his pieces were consistently handcrafted and produced, at most, in small batches, as was the case for this chair, designed for the Argyle Street Tea Rooms in Glasgow and one of Mackintosh’s best-known items of furniture.
Its most striking feature is the unusually high backrest which later became a hallmark of Mackintosh’s seating furniture and which appears for the first time in this model. It is capped with an oval headrest and carved with the stylized silhouette of a bird with spread wings. The chair’s construction is conventional yet retains a certain elegance. The back legs forming the backrest above the seat not only narrow as they continue but also change their form. The square shape gradually changes to an oval before emerging as a circle above the headrest. The high esteem in which Mackintosh himself held this design is shown in his decision to display it at numerous international exhibitions and to use the chairs in his own flat.
A variation, which included armrests and a crescent-shaped cut-out in the headrest, was displayed in his competition entry for Haus eines Kunstfreundes, organized in 1901 by the Darmstadt-based publisher, Alexander Koch.
Text: Mathias Remmele
