Details

Object type

watercolour

Title

Port Vendres - La Ville

Artist/Maker

Charles Rennie Mackintosh artist

Place Associated

France, Port Vendres (place depicted)

Date

circa 1925-1926

Materials

watercolour, paper

Dimensions

unframed: 457 mm x 457 mm; sight size: 444 mm x 447 mm

Description

Pencil and watercolour on paper titled 'Port Vendres - La Ville', by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1925-26.

In 1923 Mackintosh and his wife Margaret made the first of many long visits to the South of France over a four-year period. Mackintosh almost obsessively painted the landscape. They regularly stayed in the small town of Port-Vendres, a port near the Spanish border that hosted a main shipping route to North Africa. Margaret, in a letter to her friend the dancer Margaret Morris wrote: “there is no place that I have found yet – which gives one so much pleasure as Port Vendres.”

Mackintosh painted many watercolours of the town and the quay, contrasting the built environment with the fields and hills of the surrounding landscape. Here he captured the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of the local architecture – simple white facades, sloped roofs – countered by the geometric placement of windows. The quayside hotel where he and Margaret resided – the Hôtel du Commerce – is visible at the left, recognisable by the large projecting awning casting a pronounced shadow.

Credit Line/Donor

Purchased from the Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition, 1933

ID Number

1856

Location

In storage