A rare lantern designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is due to be sold at auction alongside several other works by the Scottish designer.
The lantern was designed for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms in Glasgow and is believed to be one of only five known complete examples still in existence. It is expected to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000 at Lyon & Turnbull’s Design Since 1860 sale, held in Edinburgh and online on Wednesday October 14 and Thursday 15.
Lanterns of the design can be seen in photographs from Mackintosh’s time hanging in the White Dining Room at Ingram Street, also known as the Ladies’ Luncheon Room, which was completed in 1901.
The auction will also include a ladderback chair designed by Mackintosh for Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms in Glasgow. Bidding is expected to start at between £10,000 and £15,000.
John Mackie, Lyon & Turnbull’s head of design, said it was “a real privilege and delight” to handle the lantern, describing it as “a rare and beautiful object from Mackintosh’s most creative period”. He called the 1903 ladderback chair “his most successful treatment of this vernacular form”.
The auction house said the other four known lanterns belong to cultural body Glasgow Life. In 1996, they featured in the reconstruction of the White Dining Room for a travelling Mackintosh exhibition organised by Glasgow Museums.
The chair comes from the collection of the late Glasgow architect Eric Sloane, who died in 2013 and had a deep interest in Mackintosh’s work. Other items from his collection include original cutlery from Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, estimated at £1,500 to £2,000.
Mackintosh’s folio of designs for German architecture and decorative arts publisher Alexander Koch’s competition to design a Haus eines Kunstfreundes, or House for an Art Lover, is estimated at £4,000 to £6,000.
His designs, submitted in December 1900, were incomplete, but judges recognised their originality and awarded him a special prize. A modified version of the design was built in 1999 in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.
