MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) OPHELIA, 1908 watercolour on vellum, signed and dated MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH 1908, bears Jas. McClure & Son label verso panel 19.5cm x 46.8cm (frame size 35.7cm x 64.7cm) Sotheby's, Glasgow Scottish and Sporting Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours, Wednesday 30th January 1985, lot 245Private Collection, Glasgow Literature: Billcliffe R. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art of the Four, Quatro, 2017, p. 201, no. 234 illustrated.Amelia S. Levetus Glasgow Artists in Vienna: Kunstschau Exhibition, Glasgow Herald, 29 May 1909, p. 11.Before her marriage to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, both in life and professionally, Margaret Macdonald had already long fostered an innovative creative partnership with her sister Frances Macdonald, in the years prior to the latter’s marriage to Herbert McNair. Infamously ‘The Four’, or ‘Spook School’, astonished and confounded the British artworld in equal measure – whilst, it must be noted, simultaneously impressing their counterparts in Europe. The sisters’ ability to shock was compounded as much by their gender as their originality. The Glasgow School of Art where they studied under Fra Newbery was unique in its respect for the abilities of its female pupils. This departure from historical precedent coincided with the advent of the “New Woman” - who was educated, smoked and rode a bike (!) - as well as increasing momentum within the suffrage movement. Margaret and Frances were encouraged by a supportive family and allowed to follow their artistic path, with the pair even setting up their own design studio in Glasgow after graduation. Their work was recognised (with accompanying ripples of wonder and consternation from their critics) for the maturity and strength of its aesthetic from a very early stage. Highly unusually for the time, they began painting the female nude from as early as the 1890s. More controversially still, they subverted its traditional representations. Contemporary reviews describe their figures on a spectrum ranging from “spectral, hideous and lean”, to “fearfully, wonderfully and weirdly “new”.This stunning 1908 watercolour on vellum by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh is a highly interesting case when considering the contexts in which she and her sister were working. Titled ‘Ophelia’ on its old gallery label verso, it also bears the address of her studio at 45 Glebe Place, Chelsea where she worked from 1915 to 1923. It may be that the picture was also exhibited at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1909 titled the “Dead Princess”. An article in the Glasgow Herald of the same year commented “…the “Dead Princess” is a work of ethereal beauty, and at the same time an earnest work of art. Such art is indeed a revelation”.One of course can make a ready comparison to John Everett Millais’ 1852 oil of the same name, a romanticised representation of Shakespeare’s young noblewoman driven to madness, who ultimately drowns herself. Artists typically choose to illustrate the moment she finds peace in death. The tragedy of Ophelia’s story can be said to lie in her lack of agency in the face of dominating men. It is certainly possible that Macdonald Mackintosh was examining such themes, but we must remember that the crux of the work of ‘The Four’ was, in Mackintosh’s words, “the indefinable side of art”, and interpretation is therefore seldom a straightforward exercise. ‘Ophelia’ does make for a more poetic title than ‘Dead Princess’, but this alternative title does also speak to the nature of Macdonald Mackintosh’s oeuvre. ‘The Four’ were Symbolists, born of the aesthetic movement which was characterised by a “sensual morbidity”, as Janis Helland (author of ‘The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald’, published Manchester University press, 1996), succinctly puts it. Margaret and Frances were unafraid to approach weighty subject matter in a decorative fashion, with beauty transforming all. Poetry, pre-Christian spirituality and the metaphysical intermingle within their dream-like artistic aesthetic.Similar explorations of the theme of the sleeping / deceased female form abound in both artist’s work, from Frances’ ‘Sleeping Princess’ of c.1895, to a later work by Margaret of 1913, ‘The Pool of Silence’, created the year prior to Charles and Margaret’s exodus from Glasgow, pushed out as they were by oppositional ideologies and relentless hostility towards their artistic values. It is also interpreted as a meditation on the death of her mother that year. The supine form is almost as common a design trope within their paintings as the elongated vertical form for which they are so famous. Figures recur, laid out like Egyptian sarcophagi, carved tombs to medieval queens, or elemental Celtic wisps. Much of the sister’s aesthetic exploration of the female form can be read as a rejection of - and repost even - to the idealised sensuality of the Pre-Raphaelite ‘type’. Their women are something altogether different, “destroying a relationship with either the Pre-Raphaelite beauty, the Victorian maiden, or the fin-de-siecle femme fatale”, to again borrow Janice Helland’s apt phrasing. Any sexuality is latent at most, and more readily perceivable as remote or unreachable. Their female archetype is to be read on a metaphysical level, as an arcane force of the natural world, with physical death being but part of the regenerative cycle of all life.In this work, the waters around the figure may well represent these swirling forces of life and death. Her hair tendrils around her, cocoon-like, womb-like even, and poised for metamorphosis. Reflections and grasses in the water are masterfully rendered, placing the figure in an infinite and formless space. The piece is intrinsically melancholic in tone, heightened by a tragic chorus of ghostly cherubic faces which hover above the sitter’s head. Atmospherically, it is replete with “the symbolist tendency to incorporate a haunting silence”, as Helland notes.This quiet, exquisite work showcases the artist’s skill across process, form and content; an ability shared by her collaborators in ‘The Four’ and arguably unmatched by their contemporary peers. Their skill, sophistication and originality are now rightly celebrated on an international scale. ‘Ophelia’ is a wonderful illustration of how the complexity of their iconography has the power to intrigue even to this day.The label verso is from James McClure & Son, a fine art dealers based in Glasgow, and has the dealer's full details as a header; and the typewritten text reading “Watercolour on Vellum/ ‘Ophelia’/ by/ Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh/ 2 Cedar Studios,/ 45 Glebe Place, Chelsea, S. . ."
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) BOOKPLATE FOR JOHN EDWARDS, 1896 printed paper, printed artist's mark lower left MARGT. MACDONALD/ INVT. ET DELT. 11.8cm x 8.9cm
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) BOOKPLATE FOR JOHN EDWARDS, 1896 printed paper, pasted into the inside cover of THE WORKS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER, edited by WW Skeat, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1894 11.8cm x 9cm
CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH AND MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH INTEREST MEMORIAL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE 1933 McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 4-27th May 1933, printed by Begg Kennedy & Elder Printers, Glasgow
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) BOOKPLATE FOR JOHN EDWARDS, 1896 printed paper (11.5cm x 9cm) Note: This image was also published in the 'Studio' magazine in 1897 and the Austrian Secession Movement periodical 'Ver Sacrum' in 1901.
Meuble - argentière Art&Craft en placage d'acajou ouvrant par deux portes à décor "d'Arbres en fleurs" en bois sculpté et polychromé. Surmontée d'une tablette en verre. Ornementation en laiton et pierreries de couleur turquoise. Attribué à Margaret Mackintosh. Ecole écossaise, de Glasgow. (Eclats à la vitre). Dim.:113x90x50,5cm.
Important poster, designed for The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts Printed by Carter and Pratt, Glasgow, Scotland. Recto printed with CARTER AND PRATT · ART POSTER LITHOs · GLASGOW.
Girl With Eyes Open 1909 pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on vellum laid on paper laid on canvas, in oak frame signed with monogram and dated 1909 29.5 by 42.5 cm. 11 5/8 by 16 3/4 in.
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) THE SILVER APPLES OF THE MOON, 1912 pencil and watercolour, with highlights of gilt paint and gum arabic, on gesso prepared paper, laid on cardboard 27 x 28½ in. (68.2 x 72.5 cm.) signed MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH 1912
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH (1865-1933) COVER OF 'DEUTSCHE KUNST UND DEKORATION', MAY 1902 printed with pink, purple and black ink on grey paper, framed 28.5 x 20cm
AFTER MARGARET MACDONALD (1865-1933) AND FRANCES MACDONALD (1873-1921) COPPER AND ENAMEL WALL SCONCE with two candle arms supporting nozzles and broad drip trays, the circular backplate repoussé decorated with opposed female figures centred by an applied enamelled roundel depicting an eye 70.5cm high x 40cm wide
MARGARET MACDONALD MACKINTOSH THE WHITE ROSE AND THE RED ROSE, 1902 painted gesso over hessian, with glass beads 38½ in. x 39½ in. (97.8 cm. x 100.3 cm.)
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh Handbill poster for Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration Germany, May 1902 Decorated in blue, purple, and gray with a stylized bird and flowers, mounted on board, unframed Image ht. 11 1/4, wd. 7 7/8 in. (28.5, 20.0 cm) Reference: P. Garner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts 1890-1940, Van Nostrand, New York, 1978, p. 199
Designed by Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh for Fritz W„rndorfer, Vienna, circa 1902 Gesso on panel, inlaid with abalone, set with string and glass beads 7 7/8in. x 7 7/8in. (20cm. x 20cm.) size of each panel (2) PROVENANCE Fritz W„rndorfer, Vienna American private collector in 1940 By descent Sotheby's New York, 14th June 1991, Lot 328 when acquired by the Fine Art Society on behalf of the present consignor LITERATURE The Studio, Vol. LVII, p. 72 Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement, London, 1977, pl. 60 Roger Billcliffe, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings and Interior Designs, New York, 1979, pp. 123-125, pl. 1902.G, 1902.I-K, 1902.17-18 Jude Burkhauser (Ed.), Glasgow Girls. Women in Art and Design 1880-1920, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum Kelvingrove Exhibition Catalogue, Edinburgh, 1990, p. 93, figs. 105 & 106 Charlotte Gere & Michael Whiteway, Nineteenth Century Design. From Pugin to Mackintosh, London, 1993, pp. 274 & 275, plates 344 & 345 Charlotte & Peter Fiell (Ed.), Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Cologne, 1995, p. 100 Egger, Robertson, Trummer & Vergo, A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and the Salon W„rndorfer in Vienna, Vienna, 2000, pp. 66/7 et. al. Victor Arwas, Art Nouveau. From Mackintosh to Liberty, the Birth of a Style, London, 2000, p. 68 - Opera of the Sea illustrated Roger Billcliffe, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Textile Designs, San Francisco, 1993, p. 32 - oil and tempera painting for The Opera of the Sea illustrated Pamela Robertson, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Art is the Flower, Glasgow, 1995, p. 61, pl. 35 - oil and tempera painting illustrated Timothy Neat, Part Seen, Part Imagined. Meaning and Symbolism in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 145 - oil and tempera painting illustrated EXHIBITION Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow Museums Travelling Exhibition, 25th May 1996 - 12th October 1997, Cat. Nos. 198i & 198ii Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style, Travelling Exhibition in Japan, 15th September 2000 - 18th February 2001, pp. 100 & 101, Cat. Nos. 77 & 78 NOTES These two panels were made to fit in the piano, above the keyboard, which Mackintosh designed for Fritz W„rndorfer in 1902. They pre-date by three to four years the series of panels which were installed as a frieze in W„rndorfer's Music Salon. These later panels were inspired by Maeterlinck's The Seven Princesses and elements of the story can be identified in these two smaller panels. Although the panels were made, and signed, by Margaret Macdonald it is possible that she was working to a design by Mackintosh himself. In all of the gesso panels which Margaret made for Mackintosh projects - such as those at The Hill House, for the Turin Exhibition writing desk and for the Room de Luxe at the Willow Tea Rooms - the complexity and quality of the compositions are substantially different from the panels and watercolours which Margaret made on a speculative basis, unconnected with Mackintosh. Some dozen years later Margaret reworked the designs in a much larger and looser pair of canvases which again bear traces of Mackintosh's input; one of these is presently in the collections of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.
