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

Three of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's botanical watercolours, 'Winter Rose', 'Walberswick Floral Study (Gilardia)' and 'Japanese Witch Hazel', each presented as a period exhibition poster and sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints.

The Walberswick studies mark a turning point. In 1914, with architectural commissions drying up in Glasgow, Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh left for the Suffolk coast, intending a short break that stretched to fifteen months. He drew almost daily: around forty flower studies survive, each identified by its plant name, the place, the year and the initials of both husband and wife in a small ruled cartouche. The drawings are exact enough to name the species and yet composed with the same feeling for line and interval as his furniture and lettering. The Gilardia sheet here is dated Walberswick 1914.

The three chosen for this set share a cool, spare palette and a great deal of empty paper. The Winter Rose is barely more than a pencil line and a wash of pink; the Witch Hazel throws a few purple and yellow flowers across bare stems; the Gilardia is the most fully worked, with its red and yellow head above blue-green leaves. Hung together, they read as one sustained act of looking.

Each poster imagines a different exhibition of the work. The Winter Rose becomes a 1973 show of drawings and watercolours at the Kunstmuseum Grindelwald, in German, set in a mid-century Swiss sans-serif; the Gilardia is presented as 'Walberswick Watercolours 1914-1915' at the Matsby Memorial Art Gallery in 1959; the Witch Hazel as a 1975 exhibition of watercolours at the Galerie Watelet, Brussels, in French, in the Helvetica of a Belgian gallery announcement of the period.

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.