A suite of furniture designed by the world famous architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh [1] is coming home to Bath one hundred years after it first arrived in the city and nearly 50 years after it became part of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) collection in London.
Designed for the family home of Bath based businessman and engineer Sidney Horstmann, the bedroom suite, which arrived in the city in 1917, will be re-created in the Museum of Bath at Work as part of a special exhibition called , ‘A Bedroom in Bath’, that will run this summer from June to October 2017 [2]. The items in the exhibition will be on loan from the V&A.
Bath is only one of a few known locations for Mackintosh-commissioned work in England. The Scottish architect and designer visited the West Country three times during his formative years in the 1890s travelling to the Cotswolds, Somerset and Dorset [3]. Some of the tall grand windows at Montacute House, near Yeovil, inspired those in the Glasgow School of Art, his masterpiece, and the small country church at Merriot in Somerset, influenced Mackintosh’s Queen’s Cross Church in Glasgow.
Dr Trevor Turpin, Chairman of the Museum Board, who has curated the exhibition, said: “This is the first time that the people of Bath will be able to see a bedroom designed by Mackintosh for a room in Bath. It may not happen again for another 100 years.
“With the bedroom suite coming back to Bath a new chapter in the story of Mackintosh has been opened. This exhibition is all about travelling back in time to see the furniture and the careful attention to detail that is the hallmark of Mackintosh and has inspired generations of designers and architects.”
Mackintosh designed the interior for the bedroom and also the furniture in a house that Sidney Horstmann bought in 1916 and lived in until 1935. His daughter Alison Dunmore was born in one of the beds designed by Mackintosh and had fond memories of growing up in the room, which was her own bedroom.
Sidney Horstmann had been introduced to Mackintosh’s work via his friend and fellow businessman Wenman Bassett-Lowke. The Northampton based engineer Bassett-Lowke had commissioned Mackintosh to design the interior and furniture for his home in the town in 1916 [4].
Pamela Robertson, Professor Emerita of Mackintosh Studies, University of Glasgow, said: “It will be marvellous to see the Horstmann furniture set against a recreation of the original Mackintosh decorative scheme. This has not been done before, and is all the more resonant for being set up in Bath. The project will greatly add to our understanding of Mackintosh’s post-Glasgow interior designs.”
Max Donnelly, Curator of Nineteenth-Century Furniture at the V&A, said: “Mackintosh’s bedroom furniture for the Horstmanns looks surprisingly modern considering it was made a century ago. The V&A is delighted to be lending part of this stylish suite for display in Bath.”
When the furniture returns to Bath this summer for the exhibition it will be situated in a space which will replicate Mackintosh’s bedroom design, created by Paul Minott, Senior Lecturer at the nearby Bath Spa University School of Art and Design, supported by current students at the University.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who was born in Glasgow, is best known for the hugely influential Glasgow School of Art; one of the most important buildings in the UK designed in late Victorian Britain. The library in the School is currently being restored following a devastating fire back in 2014.
The Museum of Bath at Work has been supported by the Ready to Borrow grant from the Arts Council England, in order to borrow the furniture from the V&A [5].
This special exhibition at the Bath Museum of Work will open on the 14 June and will run until October. More information is available via https://www.bath-at-work.org.uk/ or by calling 01225 318348.