Details

Object type

chair

Artist/Maker

Charles Rennie Mackintosh designer

Culture/School

Glasgow Style

Place Associated

Scotland, Glasgow, Ingram Street Tea Rooms (place of use)

Date

1900

Materials

stained oak, modern horse-hair upholstery

Dimensions

overall: 1500 mm x 474 mm x 435 mm 7040 g

Description

Stained oak high-backed chair with modern horsehair upholstery, from Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms, 1900, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, maker unknown.

Mackintosh is famous for his radical high-backed chairs. For these, he simplified historic chair forms by stripping away fussily carved surfaces, a process facilitated by placing tracing paper over an illustration in a book to mark out essential forms. Judging from the arrangement and width of this chair’s back splats, it is likely that Mackintosh’s starting point for the design was a carved-wood Dutch or English William and Mary late sixteenth-seventeenth century high-backed chair. By stretching and elongating the back, Mackintosh dramatically exaggerated the chair’s height to both frame and partially enclose the sitter.

This is one of two early high-backed chairs in Glasgow Museums’ collection designed by Mackintosh for the Ingram Street Tearooms. As so few of these chairs survive, and no photographic evidence shows them in use en masse it is thought that these chairs were most likely placed in strategic locations around the rooms worked on by Mackintosh at Ingram Street in 1900, including the billiards room in the basement.

This is simply an elongated, taller version of Mackintosh's standard height dining chair with a single pierced square, designed for the Ladies Luncheon Room and Cloister Room of that year. This version has the addition of three pierced squares at the top of each of the two central back splats - the positioning of which helps to draw the eye up the height of the chair. Mackintosh's original drawing for this and the standard dining chair depict these pieces of furniture in green stained wood. However, the completed chairs were stained dark brown probably to deliberately contrast with the light painted panelling and stencilled walls of the interiors.

Credit Line/Donor

Acquired by Glasgow Corporation as part of the Ingram Street Tearooms, 1950

ID Number

E.1982.44.1

Location

In storage