Mackintosh watercolours show great designer's hidden talent

He is one of the most influential designers of the 20th century whose trademark creations can be found on everything from tea towels to earrings.

But another side of the artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh goes on display this weekend, with the opening of a new exhibition featuring his forgotten watercolours. As well as being a gifted designer, the Glasgow-born architect - known best for the School of Art building in his home city - was also a talented painter.

However, his achievements were unappreciated during his lifetime and he grew increasingly bitter about his lack of recognition. Born in 1868, the son of a policeman, he suffered from depression, turned to drink and, by the early 1920s, had abandoned architectural practice entirely and moved to the south of France where he indulged his passion for watercolour landscape painting.

Now an exhibition of that work is to be held, including more than 40 watercolour paintings created by the artist in the last years of his life, along with a previously unseen collection of letters written to his wife.

It is known that Mackintosh painted 44 watercolours during a stay in the French village of Port Vendres but the whereabouts of three of the pieces are still unknown.

Mackintosh himself had intended to hold an exhibition of his paintings once he had completed 50 but his death in 1928 from tongue cancer meant the ambition was never realised.

The only time the paintings have previously been shown together was at the Glasgow Mackintosh Memorial Exhibition in 1933, when many of the exhibits were sold to museums around the world and private collectors.

Only two of the paintings were ever shown in public during his lifetime.

"In many ways this is the exhibition that Mackintosh wanted himself," said a spokesman for the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh where Charles Rennie Mackintosh in France: Landscape Watercolours, opens tomorrow and runs until 5 February next year.

"When Mackintosh was in London in the 1920s, his architecture career wasn't bringing him the same success it had done when he designed many of his most famous buildings at the turn of the century.

"He went to the south of France for an extended holiday with his wife and ended up staying there until 1927, during which time he turned to painting.

"He had always painted but this was the first time he had given himself over to it completely." Although his significance was not recognised during his lifetime, Mackintosh, who suffered from dyslexia, is now widely credited with pioneering the Modern Movement in Scotland.

His works exist as the greatest flowering of the British Arts and Crafts movement in either Scotland or England.

"Meticulously executed and brilliantly coloured, these works were conceived with a sense of design and an eye for pattern in nature which owes much to his genius as an architect and designer," said the spokesman.