Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolour of French village to be sold at auction

Independent

11-04-2025

A watercolour painted by Charlie Rennie Mackintosh of a French village just three years before he died is being sold at auction valued at around £150,000.
The Design Since 1860 auction by Lyon & Turnbull includes watercolours, cutlery and furniture designed by artist and architect Mackintosh, who died aged 60 in December 1928 in London, a year after returning from France.
Mackintosh and his wife, artist Margaret Macdonald, moved from London to south-west France in 1923 for a cheaper lifestyle after a downturn in demand for work.
The watercolour, titled Bouleternere, was painted in 1925 with sparing use of colour and depicts the hillside town.
It is valued at between £100,000 and £150,000.
Also included in the sale are two small paintings produced in 1901 when Mackintosh was first experimenting with watercolours. Brookweed and Pimpernel are both valued at between £15,000 and £20,000.
The auction includes other items by Mackintosh including cutlery valued at £20,000-£30,000 which was commissioned in 1902 by Jessie and Fra Newbery, who also commissioned him to build Glasgow School of Art.
A cabinet designed by Mackintosh for Scotland Street School in Glasgow in 1906 will be auctioned at between £4,000 and £6,000.
The artworks will be sold live online and in Edinburgh on April 17 as part of Lyon & Turnbull's two-day sale.
Bouleternere was acquired by Ronald WB Morris of Kilmacolm after a memorial exhibition of the couple's work at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow in 1933, after the death of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.
Morris was an executor of the estate, a decade after the couple moved to the Pyrenees-Orientales at Amelie-les-Bains in 1923.
Encouraged to go to France by Scottish colourist JD Fergusson and his partner Margaret Morris, Mackintosh was drawn to the way the town's buildings had organically grown on a sloping hill with a small church at the top.
In 1925, at the time Bouleternere was painted, Margaret wrote in a letter to artist and embroiderer Jessie Newbery: 'The buildings here are a perpetual joy to us.'
The couple returned to the UK in 1927 when Mackintosh began suffering symptoms of cancer, and he was diagnosed in London, and later died there.
Head of sale at Lyon & Turnbull John Mackie said: 'This is an amazing watercolour. Beautifully preserved and wonderfully fresh, it shows a different side to a multi-talented man who mastered many different art forms during his relatively short lifetime.
'The paintings were part of a series of watercolours created in France towards the end of his life and are considered extremely important in terms of his artistic development and maturity.
'Also included in the sale are two small paintings produced more than two decades earlier in 1901 when he was first experimenting with watercolours.
'As Mackintosh's biographer Roger Billcliffe states: 'These works underscore his innovative approach to landscape painting and suggest a promising future as a painter, tragically curtailed by his untimely death from cancer in 1928.''