The Mysterious Garden

By Isabelle Holloway

Or by the moon lifting her silver rim

Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim

Coming into the blue with all her light.

O Maker of sweet poets, dear delight

Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers;

Spangler of clouds, halo of crystal rivers,

Mingler with leaves, and dew and tumbling streams,

Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,

Lover of loneliness, and wandering,

Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!

These lines (113-122) of John Keats’ “I Stood tip-toe upon a little hill” imprint my mind with a lingering, hazy impression of nocturnal beauty, much like that of which persists in Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh’s own The Mysterious Garden. An image of soft ethereality, complemented by floaty, unrushed motions, and perfect slumber under nature’s fragile embrace, render both pieces as consummately poetic visions of Symbolism’s mystical abstraction and Art Nouveau’s sinuous naturalism. Mackintosh drew much inspiration from the souls of these movements, influenced by poetry, aptly, as well as folklore, Celtic art, and personified abstract concepts such as time and season. Yet, above all, imagination was arguably Mackintosh’s greatest muse: originality and playfulness predominantly shaped her legacy with the Glasgow Style and the Glasgow Girls with whom, for instance, she would often design various anachronistic ensembles. In her own artwork, Mackintosh hardly relied on sketchbooks, rejecting careful observations of temporal materiality in favor of transcendental and ephemeral glimpses as derived from her psyche or mystical experiences. Her imaginative style manifests in subliminal airiness among the diaphanous strokes of The Mysterious Garden.

James Craig Annan, Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh, circa 1901, modern bromide print, 209 x 158 mm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, The Mysterious Garden, 1911, watercolour and ink over pencil on vellum, laid on board, 45.10 x 47.70 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Mackintosh uses vellum, or calfskin, as her substrate for The Mysterious Garden. As vellum is a naturally translucent base, the overall effect of applying watercolor and ink as a medium is pronouncedly spectral, casting an irradiant glow upon the whole of the Garden and its slumbering subject. Both a dabbing technique and slowly dried wash are applied to the piece in order to create vacillating areas of transparency and deeper, speckled moments of color. A hushed, periwinkle color stirs within the elements of the Garden, compatibly accented with shades of gray and a raspberry-red. The faded coolness of the colors may be reminiscent of the gentle motions of a stilled ocean, or of a fragrant and lush flower bed, whereby the hair and body of the dreamer can gracefully assume a petalled form.

In a kind of haunting, unfading persistence, eight faces hover along the upper frame of The Mysterious Garden. The assembly of these heads on a level axis produces an uncanny effect, likened perhaps to a council of judges peering down upon their subject of whose fate is yet to be determined. This effect is magnified all the more by the unsettling fixation of the faces’ eyes upon a close-eyed dreamer, with the exception of one which hovers atop the dreamer’s head. This anomalous head appears either to gaze into the imperceptible distance or at the very viewer themselves, evoking physical uncertainty and discomfort in mere ambiguous indiscernment. A similar case of ambiguous discomfort is characterized by the pallor of these faces, which may simultaneously allude to both haloed, inner tranquility as well as to bloodless infirmity, or even death. Symbolically, this row of faces may represent the rolling dreamscape which passes in the dreamer’s mind as various subconscious figures from, say, her childhood, workplace, or local market become roused in the mind’s nightly interpretative dance.

Likewise to the row of eight faces, the pairings of birds and an all-seeing eye contain ambiguous meaning depending on the subconscious mind’s interpretation of them. However, considering the way in which the birds and eye seemingly dissolve into a further abstracted background, one can assume that their symbolic importance is less significant than that of the hovering faces, occupying themselves rather as part of a vanishing collection of props to support the main act of the dream sequence. Nevertheless, the pairings of birds may be interpreted as potent symbols of Nature; though their bodies are comparatively delicate against the overall body of the work, their saturated vivacity renders them as gentle reminders of Nature’s lowly, but fierce energy. The birds, too, may bear a more harrowing meaning: rather than embody optimistic visions of Nature, their stolid coupling, not unlike if they were to be invisibly tethered, may remind one of fatal impassivity. Their hopelessly open beaks may symbolize fragility in the physical realm, and thus fortify The Mysterious Garden as an authentic view of a dreamscape. The all-seeing eye can imply invasive or divine omniscience, or simply be the half-forgotten remnant of a former face. It is feasible that this eye is gazing at the viewer from their own familiar physical realm, hence its dissolved state in the slumbering world of the Garden; this would, effectually, raise a heightened state of anxiety in a viewer, while also creating a state of self-reflective meditation.

In all of these potential symbolizations, the true dreamscape is hatched: a landscape riddled with blurred objects, ambiguous figures, and all the feelings, memories, and unconscious meanderings concealed in a human spirit. The title The Mysterious Garden, therefore, accurately depicts the enchanting mystique and obscurity of this sub-material, soporific world. The dreamy, life-teeming (or anti-life-teeming?) Garden, though familiar to us for great proportions of each day, nevertheless feels remote, otherworldly, and ethereal. By delivering to us a hauntingly beautiful Eden for dreams, Mackintosh’s The Mysterious Garden reminds us of their significance: that by indulging in the introspective process of discerning patterns, symbols, and faces in our dreams, we can unveil the previously latent parts of our psyches in order to awake more sensible of our faults and more perceptive of the temporal world around us.

Bibliography

"A Leading Light: The Mysterious Garden by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh." YouTube. Scottish National Gallery Project, 31 July 2021, https://youtu.be/roFTQdJis3E.

Keats, John.Poetical Works. London: Macmillan, 1884; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/126/.

“Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh.” Love Mackintosh: Support The Willow Tea Rooms Trust Today, https://www.willowtearoomstrust.org/margaret-macdonald-mackintosh-life.

"Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh - National Portrait Gallery." National Portrait Gallery, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw150581/Margaret-MacDonald-Mac kintosh.

Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald. “The Mysterious Garden.” National Galleries of Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/115533.

The Mysterious Garden

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