Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Architectural Sketches

Pamela Robertson (ed)

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Review

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an architect of genius, an interior designer of startling originality and a painter of the highest order.  One particular gift above all however, contributed to his greatness in all these spheres.  He could draw like an angel!  Such was his ability that any scrap of paper on which he as much as scribbled or doodled can be considered a work of art.

Sketching has always been an important tool for the serious student of architecture. The activity hones skills of draughtsmanship and observation, helps develop an understanding of architectural form and establishes a ready reference library.

Mackintosh sketched from his youth until, in his late forties, painting came to dominate his artistic output.  He travelled extensively in Scotland and England during the 1890s and early 1900s with one very significant trip abroad on a scholarship to Italy in 1891.  His drawings were private and rarely exhibited or published in his lifetime.  These informal pencil studies, executed free from the constraints of academic supervision, are amongst the earliest works to show his developing individuality.

All his original sketchbooks are similar to the facsimile reproduced here from the archive of the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery and Pamela Robertson, the museum’s senior curator, has chosen a selection of images to present the full range of the Mackintosh output.  The Italian drawings show his understanding of classical principles, his UK wanderings reveal his fascination with the vernacular traditions and the fields around Walberswick in Suffolk yielded the highly individual botanical studies which lead up to the great works of his last years.

This beautiful volume introduces us to much fascinating information on the working methods of the most celebrated architectural practitioner in Scotland’s history. - review by Stewart Grimshaw