In this biography
Quick facts
- Born
- 1875
- Died
- 1963
- Birthplace
- Port Adelaide, South Australia
- Country
- Australia
- Nationality
- Not independently established
- Known for
- Modernist still lifes, woodcuts and experiments in a national Australian art
Why this life matters
Her career makes the materials and cultural assumptions of Australian modernism visible, from hand-coloured prints to appropriations of Aboriginal designs.
Timeline
Key moments
Sydney and a new professional name
Marriage and settlement in Sydney preceded major public recognition.
Commissioned self-portrait
A national collection commission marked her standing.
Berowra
Bush surroundings became an important setting for her plant imagery.
Training across several settings
Margaret Preston was born Margaret Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide in 1875. She trained in Australia, including at Melbourne’s National Gallery school, and later worked and studied in Europe. Her formation crossed the distinctions between fine art, decorative design and practical craft. During the First World War she taught crafts to recovering servicemen at Seale Hayne in England. Those activities belong to the same working life as her paintings; they also make a simple story of an artist discovering printmaking late in life inadequate.
Sources for this section: [1]
An independent public identity
After marrying William Preston in 1919, she settled in Sydney and developed the professional identity under which she became widely known. Still lifes and prints made domestic objects into strong arrangements of shape and colour. Her interests included Japanese prints, but she pursued an Australian subject matter rather than treating European travel as her final destination. A commissioned self-portrait in 1930 also marked her growing standing in the country’s public art institutions.
Flowers, blocks and changing materials
Preston’s flower prints brought carefully selected forms into a compact pictorial space. Not every colour in them came from a separate printing block: she frequently coloured black-and-white impressions by hand. Years at Berowra in the 1930s brought the surrounding bush and native plants more directly into her work. Later experiments included Masonite matrices, stencils and monotypes. Her practice therefore cannot be reduced to one repeatable woodcut recipe, even when bold outlines make different works appear related.
A national art and its unresolved terms
Preston sought an art that would be recognisably Australian. In pursuing it she appropriated elements of Aboriginal visual cultures, a practice that requires attention to unequal cultural authority as well as formal invention. Her achievement in modernist design does not make those appropriations culturally neutral. She died in Sydney in 1963. Her legacy includes both the considerable possibilities she found in ordinary printed images and the difficult questions raised when a settler artist claimed Indigenous forms for a national style. A silver medal at the 1937 Paris international exhibition extended that public recognition beyond Australia, before her later experiments further widened the materials through which she worked.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions about Margaret Preston
- Was Margaret Preston primarily a printmaker?
- She worked in painting and several printing processes; the interaction between image design, craft and material experiment is central to her career.
- Were all her flower prints printed from colour blocks?
- No. The NGA’s process account explains that she often hand-coloured black-and-white prints.
Keep exploring
Lives connected to this story
- Arthur Boyd
Compare different Australian artists’ uses of place and the idea of a national art.
- Dorrit Black
Compare Preston’s hand-coloured woodcuts with a different colour-linocut practice.
- Thea Proctor
Read Thea Proctor, who exhibited coloured woodcuts alongside Preston in 1925, for a distinct printmaking and design career.
Sources and further reading
Explore the evidence
These references support the biography and offer further reading. Official records, first-person accounts and independent reporting provide different perspectives; image records document attribution and licensing.
- 1. Australian Dictionary of BiographyPreston, Margaret Rose
The biography was available as substantive indexed text; direct access returned a 403 response. The account does not imply inspection of its cited private records.
- 2. National Gallery of AustraliaMargaret Preston / The Prints of Margaret Preston
Related NGA Preston exhibition versions are treated as one original authored work for the combined source-use budget.
- 3. National Gallery of AustraliaMargaret Preston: Making It Modern
- 4. National Gallery of Australia, Know My NameMargaret Preston