Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, R.S.W. (1865-1933)

Margaret Macdonald (1865-1933) was a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water-Colours since 1898 and arguably one of the most individual and gifted women artists of the Glasgow School.  Although perhaps most celebrated for the work she executed in collaboration with her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, she is recognised as an innovative artist of impressive technical versatility. 

Her two dimensional work drew on allegorical and literary themes as well as the world of dreams and the imagination, executed in a muted palette to achieve the most atmospheric effects.   The style of the masque-like faces in the present lot bear affinity to her 1911 work `The Mysterious Garden'  though the meaning and source is unclear.  It is known that she drew inspiration from the Bible, the Odyssey, the poems of both Morris and Rossetti and the writings of the Belgian Symbolist author and playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, and in 1905 Dekorative Kunst commented `Mrs Mackintosh is outstanding for her illustrations of mystic poetry. Maeterlinck's imaginative writing, and the visions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti echo profoundly in her soul, and under their influence her hand creates drawings, paintings and reliefs whose unusually meticulous and delicate execution never hampers their spiritual clarity'. (`Ein Mackintosh Tee Haus in Glasgow', Dekorative Kunst, VIII, 1905, p. 266.)