Charles Rennie Mackintosh Exhibition Poster - 'Japanese Witch Hazel, Walberswick,' 1915

Japanese Witch Hazel, Walberswick (1915) is one of around forty botanical watercolours Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced on the Suffolk coast during the period that would prove to be his final phase as a working artist of national reputation. The painting shows a sprig of Hamamelis japonica — winter-flowering, native to East Asia, an established garden plant in Edwardian Britain — rendered with the same disciplined sense of line and pattern that had defined his Glasgow architectural drawings.

By the time he arrived in Walberswick in 1914, Mackintosh's architectural career had collapsed. The Glasgow Style had fallen from favour, major commissions had stopped coming, and his standing within Scottish architecture had become precarious. He and his wife and creative partner Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh took a cottage in the Suffolk village partly for retreat and partly for economy. The botanical watercolours of this period — Walberswick, then later Walberswick to London, and finally Port Vendres in southern France — were made for sale through dealers and exhibitions, but they are also some of the most disciplined and refined drawings of his career.

The Mackintoshes worked closely together on this group of studies. Margaret's draughtsmanship was as exact as her husband's, and the two signatures often appear side by side. Botanical illustration sits naturally with the Arts and Crafts conviction that ornament should grow from close observation of nature rather than from inherited pattern books, and these sheets demonstrate that principle at its most exacting.

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