Rare Rennie Mackintosh chair saved from a skip could be worth £3,000
A rare chair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh which was once salvaged from a skip is expected to fetch £3,000 at auction.
The furniture piece was created by architect and designer Mackintosh for Glasgow School of Art's library, and is one of only a few surviving chairs he designed for the school.
The 110-year-old chair, which was previously saved from a skip, is set to go under the hammer at Bonhams auction house in Edinburgh today.
The majority of the original chairs Mackintosh designed for the library in 1910, the year after the art school building opened, had to be replaced because they were too flimsy for students to use and deemed unfit for use at the world-renowned institution.
The architect had based the design on the unique set of dining chairs he created for the "Dutch Kitchen" at Miss Cranston's Tearoom on Argyle Street in Glasgow city centre.
Significant interest is expected in the chair due to the loss of the historic library in the fire at the art school in 2014, which caused millions of pounds of damage.
A multi-million pound restoration of the Mackintosh Building and its iconic library was underway when it was struck by another fire in June 2018.
The chair in question was believed to have been salvaged and restored by Joe Adams, a member of staff at the art school, whose family has now decided to put it up for sale.
Kenneth Naples, furniture specialist at Bonhams, said the chair featured "steel reinforcing rods" which were added to the furniture before they were completely withdrawn from use and replaced with a more "durable" model in the 1950s.
He said: "This example was rescued from a skip at the Glasgow School of Art which was used to feed the heating furnace in the Haldane building.
"With the permission of Harry Barnes, director of the Glasgow School of Art from 1964-1980, the vendor's father Joe Adams restored this chair but stopped short of a cosmetic restoration.
"In view of the recent tragic fires at Glasgow School of Art it is presumably one of very few library chairs still in existence."