Charles Rennie Mackintosh's furniture

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1996 by Roger Billcliffe

Mackintosh was trained as an architect in Glasgow during the 1880s and early 1890s,(1) but his first buildings, created while a draftsman for the firm of Honeyman and Keppie, rarely gave him the opportunity to design furniture. His earliest pieces of furniture were for friends and private clients and show his clear awareness of the arts and crafts movement. Dark-stained wood, often oak, predominated, although some case pieces were stained green; many pieces were embellished with brass or other metal fittings and occasionally figurative panels of beaten lead or copper, designed and made by Mackintosh himself (see Pls. IV, IVa).

Mackintosh's prime inspiration came from a piece's visual function within its setting. This is quite different from the way form followed function in the work of such architects as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, for whom functional utility usually dictated form. Mackintosh designed a piece with a mind to its presence within a room, fully aware of its part in a larger composition. Utility often took second place, which is not to say that the usability of a piece was limited, but that that was only one element in its conception. What often did suffer, however, was structural integrity, for Mackintosh would not allow construction and traditional timber technology to temper his imagination.

As Mackintosh achieved seniority within Honeyman and Keppie, his architectural output began to reflect his interest in Scottish and English vernacular buildings. His furniture, however, did not evolve from such models and from the beginning it displayed his more open mind toward design. Pat Kirkham has identified the arts and crafts concepts of "commonplace" (or workaday) and "state" (or special) in Mackintosh's furniture,(2) and insofar as "commonplace" relates to a tradition of workmanlike design and construction, Mackintosh's early pieces reflect an awareness of solidity and even rusticity. This is seen almost for the last time in the furniture he designed in 1898 and 1899 for Miss Cranston's Tea Rooms on Argyle Street in Glasgow. In these imaginative designs he combined traditional ideas of simplicity with a new sophistication of detail and complexity of individual elements. The symbolism found in the applied decoration of earlier pieces was transferred to shape and mass, taking the designs beyond "commonplace" toward a greater emphasis on visual impact.

One of the most important of these designs was the high-backed chair with an oval back rail (Pl. III), Mackintosh's first design for a high-backed chair and one that would become one of the most famous of all chair designs of the last century. Initially inspired by visual and spatial necessity, Mackintosh subsequently used high-backed chairs as visual punctuation in rooms from which he had expunged traditional architectural elements such as pilasters and paneling. At Argyle Street Mackintosh was working within rooms laid out by another architect, George Walton (1867-1933), and in the Luncheon Room he was faced with a narrow space almost one hundred feet long framed by heavy columns forming two long aisles along the sides, which were subdivided into bays by screens roughly four and one-half feet high. In the long central space Mackintosh arranged the tall chairs, the same height as the screens, in groups of six or eight around each dining table, so that the plan of the room was lifted above the heads of the diners, who were enclosed within a palisade of oval back rails and stiles.

The symbolism of these chairs is open to different interpretations, but I see them as a thicket of young trees, with the light and springy back stiles acting as thinks to support a canopy of leaves and the cutouts representing stylized birds. At almost the same time Mackintosh was designing wrought-iron versions of the Glasgow coat of arms for the nearly completed Glasgow School of Art, where the same motif of a bird in a tree predominated. Birds and trees had also played a prominent part in the imagery of earlier posters and other graphic works designed by Mackintosh and his friends Herbert McNair and Frances and Margaret Macdonald. (Subsequently, Mackintosh married Margaret Macdonald and McNair married her sister Frances.)

Mackintosh's original drawing for the chairs (Pl. II) shows how he presented the design very much in architectural terms. Like all the surviving drawings for the Argyle Street furniture, it is shown in one-twelfth scale.(3) Probably made for the client, the rendering is executed in pencil and wash and is itself a work of art. Although the major elements are apparent, the subtleties of changing sections and curved surfaces are not discernible, the details presumably to be worked out in close collaboration with the actual maker of the chair. It seems that Mackintosh came to rely on two or three finns of high-class joiners and shopfitters - not cabinetmakers - who learned how to interpret his intentions and speedily produce a well-priced prototype from his drawings.