£5,040
Auction: 11 October 2023 at 11:00 BST
pencil and wash on squared paper, showing the front and side elevation of the memorial stone, later framed
Provenance: Acquired by William Meldrum, after the Memorial Exhibition 1933
and by descent to his son, James Meldrum
Given to The Glasgow Art Club by Eva Meldrum, widow of James Meldrum, 1984
Literature: www.mackintosh-architecture.gla.ac.uk
Note: Lt Col. Oswald Arthur Gerald Fitzgerald (1875–1916) was personal military secretary to Lord Kitchener (1850–1916). Both men died in the sinking of HMS Hampshire off Marwick Head, Orkney, on 5 June 1916. Fitzgerald's body was not buried at Lyness on the island of Hoy, with others recovered from the sea, but was taken instead to Ocklynge Cemetery, Eastbourne, Sussex, where his father was buried. The design shows an upright stone slab 7 feet (2.13 m) high and just over 3 feet (0.91 m) wide at the base, framed at the top and sides by mouldings of a stepped profile. The angular mouldings have similarities with some of the stone carving at Scotland Street School and with later decorative work by Mackintosh, especially the hall fireplace at 78 Derngate, Northampton. The classical victor's laurel wreath and the military badges above and below the inscription speak the familiar language of soldiers' memorials. It is not known how Mackintosh came to make the design, or who commissioned it. Fitzgerald had served for some years with Kitchener in India, and it may have been through Mackintosh's association with Patrick Geddes's Indian town planning work in 1915–16 that the job came his way. The monument ultimately erected over Fitzgerald's grave is very much simpler and in no sense a realisation of Mackintosh's design, although it contains faint echoes of the original drawing offered here and suggests that whoever carved it may have had access to Mackintosh's design.
This sketch, and the other works by Mackintosh in this sale, belonged to James Meldrum, having come from the collection of his father William Meldrum, Mackintosh’s friend and fellow student at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1880s. James Meldrum notably staged the 1933 Memorial Exhibition of Mackintosh’s work in the MacLellan Galleries on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, along with his friend William Davidson. After James’ death, his widow Eva gifted the vast body of the William Meldrum Collection to the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. The series of works offered here were gifted to the Glasgow Art Club in the 1980s and now appear on the open market for the first time.