Lamp Near Main Door, Skelmorlie Parish Church, Skelmorlie

Free-standing wrought iron lamp beside the steps to the main doorway of Skelmorlie Parish Church, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and erected around 1895.

The lamp comprises a vertical shaft with a wider base and twisted ornamental tendrils, surmounted by a circular ornament and collar below a raised lantern.

Skelmorlie Parish Church was designed by John Honeyman and opened in 1895. Although Honeyman was responsible for the overall design, some of the church's furnishings and fittings bear the distinctive stamp of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who was working as an assistant in the architecture firm of John Honeyman & Keppie during this period. Both this wrought iron lamp standard and the session house stair display a style suggestive of Mackintosh's involvement.

The lamp standard is very similar to one shown in Mackintosh's 1896 perspective drawing of Martyrs Public School in Glasgow, which supports the view that Mackintosh is the likely designer of this specific feature.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) was born in Glasgow and is regarded internationally as one of the leading architects and designers of the twentieth century. He is known as a pioneer of Modernism, though his architecture drew much inspiration from Scottish Baronial and Scottish and English vernacular forms reinterpreted in a modern idiom. This synthesis of modern and traditional forms created a distinctive style of Scottish Arts and Crafts design known as "The Glasgow Style", developed in collaboration with his contemporaries Herbert McNair and the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald (who became his wife in 1900). These four are known collectively as "The Four", and The Glasgow Style remains synonymous with Mackintosh and Glasgow.

Mackintosh's work ranged widely across public, educational and religious buildings, private houses, interior decorative schemes and sculptures. He is associated with over 150 design projects, as both principal designer and as part of the firm of John Honeyman & Keppie (renamed Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh from 1901). The most important work from this partnership was the Glasgow School of Art, built in two phases from 1897, which culminated in the outstanding library of 1907.

During the 1890s, as a draughtsman and later senior assistant at Honeyman & Keppie, Mackintosh began designing significant features within larger schemes. The lamp standard at Skelmorlie Parish Church exemplifies his rising status within the practice, as he was given freedom to express his distinctive modern style in the design of individual fixtures.

His key works include the Willow Tea Rooms, the Glasgow Herald Building (now The Lighthouse) and Hill House, which display the modern principles of the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the synthesis of the arts—something Mackintosh applied completely to all his work, from exterior to internal decorative scheme, furniture and fittings.

Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1914 and set up practice in London the following year. He and Margaret later moved to France, where his artistic output turned largely to textile design and watercolours until his death.