During their second stay in Roussillon from November 1924 to May 1925, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret stayed in Ille-sur-Têt. They stayed in a small, comfortable, but simple and inexpensive hotel: “Hotel du Midi”on RN 27.

The building still exists today, and has become a café pizzeria: the building has remained unchanged with its rockwork balconies (a composition of cement mortar that imitates nature like the trunks of trees. These dreamlike, baroque creations became popular in the 19th century).

Four watercolours by Charles Rennie Mackintosh bear witness to this visit to the region, including one entitled “L’Héré de Mallet”.

The painting represents an element of nature that is unique in France, “the organs of Ille-sur-Têt”.

It is a composition of yellow, ochre, white, grey and brown representing a part of the cliff crowned by an intense blue sky without any clouds.

The chair support for this watercolour is situated on the left of the D2 road from Ille-sur-Têt in the direction of Montalba, just before the bridge over the river Têt and the N116.

You can visit the site of the Orgues of Ille-sur-Têt situated a little further along the road. The place allows you to discover the astonishing natural sculptures that are the “fairy chimneys”. It is a unique mineral landscape with coloured reliefs that has been sculpted by water from clays and sands taken from the Pyrenean massifs and deposited in the Têt valley over the last 5 million years.

NB: A fairy chimney is a differential erosion model which takes the form of a column of soft rock topped by a more resistant cap. The erosion is more intense on the soft part, the column, whose diameter decreases over time. As erosion takes place, the cap gradually loses its foundations and will eventually collapse, either as a whole or in pieces, depending on its morphology. Once the cap is lost, the column fades much more quickly.

Pictorial analysis

1. Mackintosh has intensified the colours of the rock and shadows and emphasised the horizontal bands of stone. The top of the boulder rises above the rock face, like a simplified Vauban fort or Mackintosh castle, and evokes his early sketch of Stirling Castle. Professor Pamela Robertson – University of Glasgow – S.Plas with kind permission of the author

2. Mackintosh has framed this beautiful rock formation in a square format.

   The unusual graphic appearance of the site suited him, and he produced this beautiful watercolour with a colourful structure based on the orange/blue contrast.

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