Argyle Chair

This afternoon I spent an hour in the Mackintosh House at the Hunterian Art Gallery taking some photographs of the furniture.

This is a detail of the Mackintosh high-back chair from the dining room in the Mackintosh House. Mackintosh furnished the dining room with examples of the chairs he designed for the Luncheon Room of Kate Cranston's Argyle Street Tea Rooms (1898/9).

The design for the furniture of the tea rooms was the first major private commission of Mackintosh's career. The Argyle chair was shown at the Eighth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, Austria in 1900 where Mackintosh's highly individual style strongly influenced and contributed to the development of work at the Wiener Werkstätte.

The attenuated lines and exaggerated height of its back anticipated many of Mackintosh's later designs. It was the first of his high back chairs to feature the top rail as an emblematic iconic symbol. The back uprights support an enlarged oval headrest with a fretted stylised flying swallow shape. Mackintosh raised the height of the chairs in order that the furniture made a dramatic statement within the room.

In a modern context various movies & TV shows like Blade Runner, Friends and Crocodiles and Star Trek have used Mackintosh furniture to create a unique style.