Traveling years (1904–1907; 1912)

After her mother died in 1903, Preston and Bessie Davidson traveled to Europe, where they stayed from 1904 to 1907, with sojourns in Munich and Paris and shorter trips to Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, and Africa.^[1] In Munich, Preston briefly studied at the Government Art School for Women^[4] but was not taken with either German teaching methods or German aesthetics.^[3] She later commented, "Half of German art is mad and vicious, and a good deal is dull."^[3]

Paris suited Preston better, and she took part in the Paris Salon of 1905 and 1906.^[3] Her developing Modernist sensibility was influenced by French Postimpressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse as well as by Japanese art and design, which she encountered at the Musée Guimet.^[1][3] From Japanese art in particular she acquired a preference for asymmetrical composition, a focus on plants as subject matter, and an appreciation of pattern as an organizing method.^[3] She began to try to reduce her own work to "decoration without ornamentation".^[3]

Returning to Australia in 1907, Preston leased a studio with Bessie Davidson, and they put on a joint exhibition from which one of her paintings Onions (1905), was bought by the National Gallery of South Australia.^[5] In 1911, Preston was asked to paint a portrait of Catherine Spence for the National Gallery of South Australia.^[5] Preston went back to France (Paris and Brittany) in 1912 with Gladys Reynell, but when World War I broke out, they moved to Great Britain. There Preston studied pottery and the principles of Modernist design at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops.^[1][3] Later, she and Reynell taught pottery and basket-weaving as therapy for shell-shocked soldiers at the Seale Hayne Military Hospital in Devonshire.^[1] She exhibited her work in both London and Paris during this period.^[1]

From these European studies, Preston returned to Australia having adopted Modernist principles.^[3] The Modernists' analytical approach to design, sense of underlying form, and simplified pictorial space would all become hallmarks of her work.^[3] The influence of her European studies can be seen, for example, in her 1927 still life Implement Blue,^[6] with its geometric forms, muted palette, and stark lighting.^[3]

Early Mosman years (1919–1932)

In 1919, Preston went to America for an exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On her way back to Australia, she met her future husband, William George "Bill" Preston, a recently discharged second lieutenant of the Australian Imperial Force.^[1] She married her husband on 31 December 1919, and wrote a false birthdate on her marriage certificate to make herself eight years younger than her husband.^[7] Bill had a placid temperament that complemented Margaret Preston's assertive personality, and they were devoted to each other throughout their marriage.^[1] Preston's friend Leon Gellert noted that Bill seemed to regard it as a national duty to keep his beloved Margaret happy and artistically productive.^[1] A successful businessman, Bill Preston was a company director for Anthony Horderns retailers, Dalton's packaging company and later, Tooheys Brewery. Their marriage gave Margaret the financial security to pursue her work and travel extensively.^[4]

The Prestons settled in the Sydney suburb of Mosman following their marriage in late December 1919. A harbour-side suburb, Mosman has long attracted artists and writers such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Harold Herbert, Dattilo Rubbo, Lloyd Rees, Nancy Borlase, and Ken Done.^[3] The Prestons would live in Mosman from 1920 to 1963, with the exception of seven years in the bush suburb of Berowra during the 1930s.

Mosman Bridge 1927

It was during the Mosman period that Preston became established as the most prominent Australian woman artist of the 1920s and 1930s.^[3] Within a year of the move to Mosman, the Art Gallery of New South Wales bought her 1915 painting Summer,^[8] at the 1920 Royal Art Society Spring exhibition.^[1] Preston was a founding member of the Contemporary Group in 1926.^[9] In 1929 the trustees of what is now the Art Gallery of New South Wales commissioned Self portrait (1930)^[10] – the first such commission to a woman artist from the Gallery.^[11][12] In the 1930s, she joined the Anthropological Society of New South Wales.^[13]

Preston joined the Society of Artists and became a friend of its president, Sydney Ure Smith, the influential editor and publisher of Art in Australia, The Home, and Australia: National Journal.^[1] Writing in Ure Smith's publications, Preston advocated for her own ideas about Australian art, especially the need to develop a national identity in art rather than endlessly imitating European models.^[3] She expressed these ideas in a 1925 article 'The Indigenous Art of Australia' in Art in Australia, illustrated on the cover and accompanying the text with relief prints from indigenous designs, which she praises for their rhythm, adapted from aboriginal shields and taphoglyphs (elsewhere called dendroglyphs; carved wooden grave markers) and which she executed in coloured wool on hessian woolpack, though the article illustrations are her prints;

"In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own I have gone to the art of a people who had never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed always to use the same symbols to express themselves. These are the Australian aboriginals, and it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring."^[14]

All told, she contributed several dozen articles on art to Ure Smith's publications as well as to the Society of Artists yearbooks.^[3] Not only did Ure Smith give more space to Preston than to any other artist, he devoted three issues to her work exclusively: the Margaret Preston Number of Art in Australia (1927), Recent Paintings by Margaret Preston (1929), and Margaret Preston's Monotypes (1949).^[3]

Preston also capitalized on the forum that women's magazines provided in allowing her to reach a wide audience for both her work and her opinions on the future of Australian art. Readers of the April 1929 edition of Woman's World were prodded to keep the covers of issues on which Preston's works had been reproduced and to frame them as pictures.^[1]

Berowra years (1932–1939)

Between 1932 and 1939, the Prestons lived in the bush suburb of Berowra. While living in Berowra, the Prestons had two terrier dogs.^[5] It was here that Preston pursued most intensively her concern for the development of a national identity in Australian art.^[3] She continued her adaptations of Australian Indigenous art, deploying Aboriginal design motifs and natural-pigment colour schemes in her work.^[4] This tendency continued even after she left Berowra and can be seen in such later works such as The Brown Pot (1940)^[19] and Manly Pines (1953).^[3][20] Preston won a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale, Paris in 1937,^[21] and that year became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.^[22]

Return to Mosman (1939–1963)

Following their seven years in Berowra, the Prestons returned to Mosman, where they would stay until Margaret Preston's death on 28 May 1963. Among their homes during this period were the former home of actress Nellie Stewart and the Hotel Mosman. Preston's later works built on the Aboriginal themes developed at Berowra, and her very last works had overtly religious themes, possibly in response to the Blake Prize instituted in 1951.^[3] In the 1950s, she made a series of gouache stencils based on religious subjects.^[5]