Charles Rennie Mackintosh watercolour painting of French village fetches £150,000 at auction

A watercolour painted by Charlie Rennie Mackintosh of a French village just three years before he died has sold at auction for £150,200.

The Design Since 1860 auction by Lyon & Turnbull included watercolours, cutlery and furniture designed by artist and architect Mackintosh, who died aged 60 in December 1928 in London, a year after returning from France.

Mackintosh and his wife, artist Margaret Macdonald, moved from London to south-west France in 1923 for a cheaper lifestyle after a downturn in demand for work.

The watercolour, titled Bouleternere, was painted in 1925 with sparing use of colour and depicts the hillside town.

It sold for £150,200, including buyer’s premium, on Thursday as part of the two-day sale.

Associate specialist Ursula Goldsmith with the Bouleternere watercolour (Stewart Attwood/Lyon & Turnbull/PA) PA Media

Bouleternere was previously acquired by Ronald WB Morris of Kilmacolm after a memorial exhibition of the couple’s work at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow in 1933, after the death of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.

Morris was an executor of the estate, a decade after the couple moved to the Pyrenees-Orientales at Amelie-les-Bains in 1923.

Encouraged to go to France by Scottish colourist JD Fergusson and his partner Margaret Morris, Mackintosh was drawn to the way the town’s buildings had organically grown on a sloping hill with a small church at the top.

In 1925, at the time Bouleternere was painted, Margaret wrote in a letter to artist and embroiderer Jessie Newbery: “The buildings here are a perpetual joy to us.”

The couple returned to the UK in 1927 when Mackintosh began suffering symptoms of cancer, and he was diagnosed in London and later died there.

Head of sale at Lyon & Turnbull John Mackie described it as an “amazing watercolour” and said it “shows a different side to a multi-talented man who mastered many different art forms during his relatively short lifetime”.

He added: “The paintings were part of a series of watercolours created in France towards the end of his life and are considered extremely important in terms of his artistic development and maturity.”