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19th century AD
Magazine Antiques, June, 1996 by Alan Crawford
The Rose Boudoir contained two high-backed chairs, one black and one white (see Pl. XII). While we should remember that Edwardian ladies sat with very straight backs, this design was one of the most extreme among Mackintosh's high-backed chairs, "whose seats were strangely near the floor and whose backs aspired perpetually to the ceiling."(3) Much of Mackintosh's popular reputation rests upon these chairs, but most people, while admiring their formal, sculptural qualities, have a sneaking feeling that they are neither comfortable nor strong. Mackintosh cared so intensely about the formal qualities of his furniture that comfort and construction could be sacrificed. But in fact, some of Mackintosh's chairs are very comfortable, and some are strong.
In 1902 the Glasgow publisher Walter Blackie asked Mackintosh to design a house for him in the town of Helensburgh, near Glasgow (Pl. IX). The Hill House, as it was called, recalled sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of the Scottish gentry with its scattered windows, stair tower, and rough stucco exterior, known as harling in Scotland. Harling helped set the house in the Scottish tradition, but also encouraged Mackintosh to move toward abstraction for, wrapped in its uniform white covering, gables, dormers, and chimneys became abstract, quasi-geometrical forms. The sense of surprise is as strong here as at the Glasgow School of Art, and perhaps the greatest surprise, after the plain exterior, is the sumptuous interior The cream-colored walls of the principal bedroom (Pl. II) are decorated with a delicate trellis of rose bushes in olive green and pink fading to gray. The bed, set in a vaulted recess, was originally hung with embroideries of dreaming women. This is the most powerful example of the dreamlike eroticism that Macdonald introduced into Mackintosh's work.
The Hill House was completed in the spring of 1904, when Mackintosh was designing interiors for Cranston for a house called Hous'hill (now destroyed) in Nitshill, a suburb of Glasgow. Despite the confusing similarity of names, the interiors at Hous'hill were quite different from those at The Hill House. Gone was the languorous intensity, the symbolic and erotic overtones. The Blue Bedroom (see Pl. I) was sharp, clear, almost brisk in design. It was a turning point in the journey of Mackintosh's imagination. From then on his decorative schemes were based on rectilinear forms, especially squares, more than on organic forms. This was in one way a small step - a change of motif - and in another way a large one - a letting go of nature, which was the principal source of inspiration in nineteenth-century design. Like the exterior of The Hill House, the Blue Bedroom was a step toward abstraction. It was also, perhaps, a letting go of the collaboration with Macdonald.
Probably the last interior that reflects the mood of collaboration is 6 Florentine Terrace, the row house that Mackintosh and Macdonald bought and remodeled in 1906, installing furniture and fittings from their Mains Street flat. The Florentine Terrace house was demolished in 1963, but the interiors were carefully reconstructed as part of the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow. Visitors to what is known as the Mackintosh House lower their voices to a museum hush, which deepens when they come to the light-filled drawing room on the first floor, as if they had come into a holy place (Pl. XI). The purity and privacy of the interior demand reverence, but as visitors become accustomed to the atmosphere, they wait until the guard is not looking and finger the white furniture, feeling the smooth paint and stroking the subtle curves. They understand the mixture of spirituality and sensuality that was the essence of Mackintosh and Macdonald's collaborative work.
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