.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This chair, designed for the Luncheon Room at the Argyle Street Tea Rooms, is one of the best known of Mackintosh's oeuvre and the most advanced, stylistically, of all the items designed for Argyle Street.
The Luncheon Room was a long narrow room which George Walton, in charge of general interior layout at Argyle Street, had divided by low screens into a number of small bays. In these bays Mackintosh placed dining tables around which he used the normal height chair (lots 26-29). This left a long central aisle, isolated down the full length, 100 feet or so, of the room. To make this central space more manageable and welcoming to diners he devised a high back chair which, when grouped around tables in six or eight, created a private and more intimate space for diners. This illusion of privacy and intimacy was the first of Mackintosh's many manipulations of such spaces, creating areas which support different functions within an enclosing larger volume. Also, Mackintosh was able here, by raising the height of the chair above the heads of seated diners, to enforce the geometric plan of the tables even on a full dining room. The tops of these chairs enabled the plan of the room to be read even when all were occupied, thus maintaining a degree of architectural control on a somewhat amorphous space. The chair itself, the first of Mackintosh's high-back chairs, is one of his most successful designs. Simply assembled, with each element interlocking with its neighbour, it serves its function well. The large oval back-rail shields the heads of diners from neighbouring tables and reinforces the sense of enclosure they must have experienced. There are various interpretations for the symbolism of these chairs but in some ways they most resemble a copse of small trees forming a palisade around their tables. The shape cut out of the back-rail is a flying bird and the oval rail itself can be read as a cloud or as the canopy of a tree, continuing the theme of naturalistic decoration found on other Argyle Street furniture.
The Luncheon Room was a long narrow room which George Walton, in charge of general interior layout at Argyle Street, had divided by low screens into a number of small bays. In these bays Mackintosh placed dining tables around which he used the normal height chair (lots 26-29). This left a long central aisle, isolated down the full length, 100 feet or so, of the room. To make this central space more manageable and welcoming to diners he devised a high back chair which, when grouped around tables in six or eight, created a private and more intimate space for diners. This illusion of privacy and intimacy was the first of Mackintosh's many manipulations of such spaces, creating areas which support different functions within an enclosing larger volume. Also, Mackintosh was able here, by raising the height of the chair above the heads of seated diners, to enforce the geometric plan of the tables even on a full dining room. The tops of these chairs enabled the plan of the room to be read even when all were occupied, thus maintaining a degree of architectural control on a somewhat amorphous space. The chair itself, the first of Mackintosh's high-back chairs, is one of his most successful designs. Simply assembled, with each element interlocking with its neighbour, it serves its function well. The large oval back-rail shields the heads of diners from neighbouring tables and reinforces the sense of enclosure they must have experienced. There are various interpretations for the symbolism of these chairs but in some ways they most resemble a copse of small trees forming a palisade around their tables. The shape cut out of the back-rail is a flying bird and the oval rail itself can be read as a cloud or as the canopy of a tree, continuing the theme of naturalistic decoration found on other Argyle Street furniture.