Charles Rennie Mackintosh in France: Landscape Watercolours
Until February 5; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh needs no introduction, but sometimes you have to point out which Charles Rennie Mackintosh you mean. It could be Mackintosh the architect, or Mackintosh the designer. It could be Mackintosh the painter of mysterious symbolist paintings, but in this case it’s a Mackintosh who is too often relegated to the final few pages of any study. For the first time, the stunning watercolours of his twilight years in France are given a show, and a book, to themselves.

Having impressed the world with his architectural innovations in Glasgow, Mackintosh found himself in London at the outbreak of the first World War. Architectural fashions had changed, and new building was low on the public agenda. In eight whole years the architect completed only a few domestic extensions and refits, and by 1923 he and his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, were ready for a fresh start.

That’s when they went to France. For four years the couple lived in relative solitude, renting lodgings in the less fashionable towns of the French Pyrénées and the Roussillon coast. Forty-four watercolours survive from those four years, but Mackintosh didn’t get the chance to hold the solo show he dreamed of. In his letters from France he complained of a sore tongue, blaming the French tobacco. In 1928, a year after returning to London for treatment, he died of cancer.

It wasn’t until after Margaret’s death, five years later, that the watercolours were discovered. Thirty were included in a retrospective exhibition at Glasgow’s MacLellan Galleries in 1933, and brought together again in 1978. Now, for just the third time since they were painted, the pictures have been reunited in a collaboration between Glasgow’s Hunterian and Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery.

They are a delight. Not only because of their meticulous draughtsmanship, and their vivid colours, but also because they convey a profound sense of harmony between man and the land.

Mackintosh would spend weeks working on each painting, sitting alone on whatever rock or bit of grass he could find. He needed sunny, windless mornings for the sharp, short shadows and smooth reflections of his landscapes, and after a morning’s work he would invariably return to Margaret for lunch. Many of the paintings are a careful combination of different views, creating lofty visions out of sprawling villages, and setting the best of nature against the best of architecture.

We know about the artist’s habits from the letters which are on show in the exhibition. During Mackintosh’s fourth and last year in France, Margaret was ill in London, and he missed her dearly. His 23 tender letters describe everything from the weather and his paintings to the ingredients of his lunch, and the changing moods of the women who prepared his meals. They give us a wealth of personal insights, such as the fact that he kept forgetting to sign his landscapes, asking Margaret to sign his name on the ones she had with her in London.

The first section of the exhibition sets the scene, with Mackintosh’s early studies of buildings and flowers, and a variety of sketchbooks filled with architectural details found on his travels. From the first sepia study, made when he was 18, these drawings and paintings display a degree of draughtsmanship as befits an architect, but with an artistic flair which didn’t go unnoticed by Mackintosh’s teachers at Glasgow School of Art.

Some of the pastoral scenes, such as the soupy Porlock Weir, are stolid in comparison with the French masterpieces of 30 years later. The real early spark lies in the spartan outline drawings of medieval castles, whose weighty bulwarks, in all their proto-Modernist simplicity, are counterbalanced with knots of fussy detail. In Castle, Holy Island, the massive planes of rock and wall are broken up with the occasional organic cluster of windows, brickwork and stylised flowers. It’s easy to see how this inspiration fed directly into Mackintosh’s building designs, and the fascination resurfaces, in full glorious technicolour, in the French paintings.

Le Fort Maillert combines two views of Fort Mailly, planting the ancient building onto an exaggerated perspective of the cliff below it. The striated rock-face occupies three quarters of the composition, with the clean lines of the old fort rising out of the rock like a new geological layer. The chequered sweep of the strata recalls the decorative patterns of the Fritillaria, one of Mackintosh’s earlier flower studies.

Mackintosh was capable of finding decorative patterns wherever he looked, be it the weaving ripple of water, the zigzag of striped fields, or the ancient terracing of hilltops. Man’s interventions in the land, seen with an eye for modern-day Land Art, are enjoyed and arranged as near-abstract compositions. The remote farmhouse in Mont Alba is the only figurative clue in a painting whose walls, fields, rocks and roads form a curvaceous sweep like those of the English Surrealist Paul Nash.

Reading these paintings is like learning that man’s interventions in nature, where they arise out of basic collective necessity, need not be seen as wholesale vandalism. The walls, fields and roads perform basic functions, and grow organically with the landscape. Mackintosh’s favourite villages all seem to form like crystals on hillsides, higgledy-piggledy, unplanned, and highly asymmetrical. In The Village Of La Llagonne, the ramshackle cluster of roofs is twinned with a dramatic rock-formation beyond, as if the stone grows and multiplies just as the village does.

A smoothly curved rock formation dominates the foreground of The Boulders, like a giant Paolozzi head, while the roofs and walls of Fetges provide a direct echo of the stones. But talk of foreground and background is misleading for these late Mackintosh images, where everything is stacked up in bands of equal emphasis, like Japanese prints.

The Boulders, like so many other landscapes in this show, is a bold, semi-abstracted image which carries within it a strong message of harmony. This very human vision of our place within the landscape is what made Mackintosh’s buildings so special. But even if Mackintosh had never been an architect, these paintings would deserve a special place in history.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.12.05