Margaret Preston

Margaret Preston (1875–1963), artist, trained at the National Gallery of Victoria School and the Adelaide School of Design before leasing a studio and beginning to teach in Adelaide. After travel and studies in Germany, France and Spain between 1904 and 1907 she returned to Adelaide to take on an increased teaching load. In 1912 she went to London, spending seven years there and in Europe before marrying and setting up house in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman in 1920. Based there for the rest of her life, though travelling extensively, she campaigned vigorously on behalf of modern art while bringing forth a large body of robust paintings and prints. A contemporary of Grace Cossington-Smith and Thea Proctor, Preston was one of the first artists to recognise the significance and aesthetic power of Indigenous Australian art, the influence of which can be seen in some of her own work. She also saw the beauty in the native flowers and trees from which Thea Proctor, for one, recoiled. Since the 1980s, many of Preston’s works have numbered amongst the most recognisable images of Australian art, featuring on placemats, teatowels, cards, notebooks, scarves, calendars and posters. The major Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospective, Margaret Preston: Art and Life toured nationally in 2005.
Harold Cazneaux came to Australia from his native New Zealand at the age of eleven. The family settled in Adelaide, where Harold began working as a retoucher in 1897. In 1904, he moved to Sydney; five years later he held his first solo photographic exhibition, which was also the first solo photographic exhibition in Australia. He was the leading photographer for The Home magazine from the early 1920s onward, and his photographs of Sydney over a number of decades have become key images of aspects of Australian history. The National Library of Australia has some two hundred Cazneaux photographs and the National Gallery of Australia has about twice that number. Some time after he took this photograph, Cazneaux took one of Preston leaning against a much-loved banksia tree in her garden. Combined, the two are definitive images of the artist, whose painted self portrait is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.