Adelaide. Art Gallery of SA. Exhibition of women artists. Margaret Preston born Adelaide in 1875. Died in 1963. Still Life with flowers. 1915.
Image by denisbin
From the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Margaret Rose Preston (1875-1963), artist, was born on 29 April 1875 at Port Adelaide, elder daughter of David McPherson, marine engineer, and his wife Prudence Cleverdon (d.1903), née Lyle. By 1885 the family was living in Sydney where Rose about 1888 began training with Lister Lister. In Melbourne in 1893 she enrolled at the National Gallery’s school of design under Frederick McCubbin.
Her father was admitted in February 1894 to Parkside Lunatic Asylum, Adelaide, where he died next year. In June 1894 she joined her sister and mother in Adelaide. She exhibited with the (Royal) South Australian Society of Arts (and continued to do so annually when in Adelaide). Returning to Melbourne in July 1896, she enrolled at the National Gallery’s school of painting under Bernard Hall and with a painting, ‘Still Life’, won a year’s free tuition. Returning to Adelaide, in 1898 she studied at the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts under Harry Gill. She leased a studio next year and began teaching full time and painting at week-ends, chiefly still-life subjects.
Inheriting her mother’s money in 1903, she moved to a new studio where one of her students was Bessie Davidson. ‘Eggs’ (1903), painted in an academic illusionist style, reveals her skill. After the selection committee of the Society of Arts rejected what she believed to be her ‘best still life’, she left Adelaide on 2 July 1904, bound for Europe with Davidson. In Munich they viewed an exhibition of the German Secessionists. Shocked by her first view of the European avant garde, Rose MacPherson took lessons at the Munich Government Art School for Women. She then went to Paris where she saw the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky and Rouault. Still conservative, Rose was thrilled to have one of her traditional oils accepted by the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français. With renewed self-confidence she studied Japanese and Chinese art at the Musée Guimet, learning ‘slowly that there is more than one vision in art’.
On her return to Adelaide in 1907 she leased a studio with Bessie Davidson and they held a combined exhibition in March. ‘Onions’ (1905) was purchased by the National Gallery of South Australia. Gladys Reynell and Stella Bowen joined her classes in 1908. She also taught at the Collegiate School of St Peter and Presbyterian Ladies’ College. A citizens’ committee in 1911 commissioned her to paint a posthumous portrait of Catherine Spence for the gallery.
In 1912 Rose and her now intimate friend Gladys Reynell arrived in London to see the Second Post Impressionist Exhibition, organized by Roger Fry, in which Matisse and Picasso were well represented. They lived in Paris and Brittany in 1913-14 before moving to London on the outbreak of war; Rose now admired Gauguin’s colour. She exhibited her first woodcuts with the Society of Women Artists, studied pottery at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and became familiar with the designs of Fry and the Bloomsbury group. Her paintings, ‘November on the Balcony’ and ‘Still-Life Sunshine Indoors’ were exhibited at the New Salon, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She also studied under the Scot A. E. H. Miller, and exhibited with the New English Art Club; ‘Anemones’ (1916) marks her final rejection of academic realism and the emergence of her new style based on colour theory.
From August 1918 MacPherson and Reynell taught shell-shocked soldiers ceramics, basketmaking and printmaking at Seale Hayne Neurological Hospital, Devon. The task required great ingenuity because traditional materials were unavailable. Next year Rose was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, United States of America. On the voyage home she met her future husband, William George Preston (1881-1978), a gunner returning after serving with the Australian Imperial Force. She and Reynell held a joint exhibition in Adelaide in September 1919 and made some of the first pottery at Reynella. There Margaret (as she was henceforth known) married Preston on 31 December.
