AN “outstanding” rare watercolour by artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh has been secured for the nation.

The National Galleries of Scotland bought the painting, entitled The Road Through The Rocks for £65,000 at Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull. The new acquisition will be on show at the Scottish National Gallery this month as part of celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth in 1868.

The work shows a French landscape and was painted around 1926. It will be displayed alongside Mont Alba, the galleries’ other Mackintosh watercolour, and three Mackintosh paintings on loan to them. The display will run until mid-January next year.

The Road Through the Rocks was exhibited at the Mackintosh memorial exhibition in Glasgow in 1933 and was later owned by Professor Thomas Howarth, an eminent Mackintosh scholar.