Margaret Preston: A Life in Australian Art
M argaret Preston -- born Margaret Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide, South Australia, in 1875 -- stands as one of the most distinctive and persistent figures in the history of Australian visual art. In a career that spanned nearly six decades and produced more than four hundred individual works, she evolved from a technically accomplished student of European traditions into a deeply original artist whose mature work drew on sources that had never before been systematically incorporated into the mainstream of Australian painting: the decorative arts of Asia and, most significantly, the visual traditions of Aboriginal Australia.
Preston's formal training began in earnest in 1893, when she enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. She remained there for just over four years, developing the careful draughtsmanship and close observation of the natural world that would characterise her early work. Her initial artistic style was shaped by the German naturalist tradition, in which plants, animals, and landscapes were rendered with painstaking accuracy rather than decorative freedom. An extended visit to Europe in 1904, including study in Paris, did little to displace this naturalism. It was only on a second visit to the French capital, some years later, that she began to recognise the expressive and decorative possibilities that other contemporary artists were exploring.
The First World War brought Preston to England, where she continued to exhibit and to broaden her technical range, developing a particular interest in printmaking. She taught basket weaving at a rehabilitation unit for wounded soldiers in the West Country, and it was on the voyage back to Australia after the war that she met William Preston, a businessman whom she married in 1919. The couple settled in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman, and it was here that Preston began to produce the work for which she first gained wide public recognition.
Her joint exhibition with artist Thea Proctor in Sydney and Melbourne in 1925 marked an important moment in her career. The prints she showed were bold, compact, and decoratively complex -- harbour views and arrangements of native flowers set in striking contrasts of black and white, often richly hand-coloured in scarlet, blue, and green, and presented in Chinese red lacquer frames. These works revealed a new confidence and a willingness to simplify and flatten form in ways that owed something to the Japanese woodblock prints she had begun to study closely. Australian wildflowers, which had rarely been treated as serious artistic subjects, were presented as vivid and worthy of attention in their own right. From 1932 to 1939, Preston and her husband moved from Sydney to Berowra, a bush setting on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River north of the city. The change was transformative. For the first time, Preston lived surrounded by the native vegetation she had previously purchased from florists. Her prints from this period became larger, less reliant on elaborate pattern, and more attentive to the forms and colours of flowers growing as they naturally occurred in the landscape. It was also during this time, prompted by Aboriginal rock engravings found near her property, that she developed the interest in Aboriginal art that would define the final decades of her career.
On returning to Sydney, Preston joined the Anthropological Society of New South Wales and began a systematic programme of visiting Aboriginal cultural sites across Australia. She believed passionately that the art of the continent's first peoples offered the essential foundation for a genuinely Australian artistic tradition -- one rooted in the land itself rather than imported from European convention. During the 1940s, the symbols, forms, and earth colours of Aboriginal art became increasingly central to her own printmaking. Her titles from this period frequently named the Aboriginal sources and locations that had inspired her work.
The culmination of this late phase came in 1953, when Preston, then aged seventy- eight, presented an exhibition of twenty-nine prints at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. These works, produced using the ancient technique of stencilling, fused her long- standing admiration for Chinese art -- she had been collecting books on the subject since 1915 and had visited China twice -- with her understanding of Aboriginal Dreamtime imagery. The exhibition was widely admired, and the works in it are now regarded among the most original produced by any Australian artist of her generation. Preston continued to work and travel until the end of her life, dying in Sydney in 1963 at the age of eighty-eight.