Charles Rennie Mackintosh Flower Watercolours - Gallery Wall Set of 3 Exhibition Posters

Three of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's flower watercolours, 'Butterfly Flower', 'Peonies' and 'Petunias', each presented as a period exhibition poster and sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints.

Mackintosh is remembered first as the architect of the Glasgow School of Art and the designer of the Willow Tea Rooms, but painting occupied more and more of his working life after 1910. The flower studies began as pencil and watercolour sketches made on holiday and developed into a sustained body of work: close botanical observation set down with an architect's line, then coloured with flat, controlled washes that owe as much to Japanese prints as to the English watercolour tradition. 'Butterfly Flower', dated Bowling 1912, carries the small cartouche of place, date and initials (his own and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh's) that he used throughout the series.

Seen together, the three make a case for Mackintosh as a colourist. The warm palette runs from the oranges and pinks of the Butterfly Flower through the deep reds of the Peonies to the purples and whites of the Petunias, and the three sheets share the same balance of exact drawing and decorative flatness. They were chosen for this set because they hang together on a wall, not only because they share an author.

Each poster imagines a different exhibition. The Butterfly Flower is presented as a 1972 show at the Scottish Society of Watercolour Painters in Glasgow, set in a Caslon-style serif; the Peonies as a 1986 exhibition of drawings and watercolours at the National Architecture Institute, Bath, in the lettering Mackintosh used on his own drawings; the Petunias as a show of paintings, drawings and furniture at the Institute of Art Workers, London. The typography on each follows the conventions of its imagined date and venue.

These are designed posters, not historical reproductions. They have been created as part of Art Poster Archive, a project focused on period-accurate exhibition graphics for artists and movements.