Margaret Preston: Recipes for Food and Art

by Lesley Harding

Celebrated for her vibrant and distinctive pictures of indigenous flowers, artist Margaret Preston was an equally colourful and outspoken personality. Less well known is her legacy as a generous and insightful teacher and keen cook, and her deep sense of civic duty. She was passionate about the need for a modern national culture that reflected everyday life. For Preston, the building blocks of such a culture were not to be found in the Australian pastoral landscape tradition, but in the home and garden. Maintaining that art should be within everyone's reach, she published widely on the methods and techniques of a host of creative pursuits—from pottery, printmaking and basket weaving, to the gentle art of flower arranging. She devoted much of her career to the genre of still life, depicting humble domestic objects and flowers from her garden, and often painting in the kitchen while keeping 'one eye on the stew'.

Drawing on recipes from handwritten books found in the National Gallery of Australia and richly illustrated with Preston's paintings, prints and photographs this book sheds new light on the fascinating private life of a much-loved Australian artist.

Genres: Biography, Australia, Art, History, Lifestyle, Nonfiction, Cookbooks

277 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2016

Reviews

[G.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margaret Preston (1875-1963) is probably Australia’s best-known woman artist. Her preferred genre was the still life, rather than the landscape or portrait, and thus her oeuvre—full of vases of flowers and bowls of fruit—has become the stuff of calendars and high-end art gallery greeting cards—indeed, that was the form in which I first encountered her work in the 1980s. So it was wonderful to begin 2017 with this book that reveals what lay beyond all those beautifully designed and executed oil paintings and hand-colored woodcut prints.

Lesley Harding’s is a biography with recipes, underlining Preston’s resolute domestic focus. Whatever her family’s expectations, they obviously took her artistic interests seriously, for she was well trained by a series of Englishmen working in colonial Australia, before an inheritance enabled her to continue her studies in Europe, where she stayed briefly in Munich before moving on to Paris. After a period teaching at a girls’ school in Adelaide, South Australia, she returned to Paris, then moved to London, where she lived from 1913-1919. During this formative period she was intimately involved with other women artists, but at the age of 44, she married a supportive younger man and lived the rest of her life in Sydney, active as an artist through her last exhibition in 1953.

The book is exquisitely produced: there are more than a hundred full-colour reproductions of Preston’s paintings and prints, many of which were new to me, as well as examples of her other work: mostly magazine covers, but also some pottery and a couple of floor rugs, as well as articles she wrote on subjects such as colour theory, flower arranging, and interior design. It’s fascinating to compare her early still lifes, at least one “an homage to seventeenth-century Dutch painting” (p. 15), with the distinctive modernist mode in which she later worked. Her late works are full of native flora and Australian landscapes that border on the abstract.

The fact that Preston did not have a dedicated studio, but preferred to work instead “on the porch, under the trees in the garden—‘anywhere the spirit moves me’, she said—with her whole environment becoming a place for artistic activity” (p. 185) is indicative of the sort of artist she was. Lesley Harding argues that Preston’s “celebration of craft and the applied arts, traditionally seen as women’s work,” and her “public speaking and publishing efforts…did much to demystify the making of art and crafts, and to encourage her listeners and readers to work creatively themselves.” (pp. xiv-xv)

Of course it was a comfortable middle-world that Preston inhabited all her life and to which she addressed herself—yet wasn’t her emphasis on the centrality of creative work to a well-lived life a lesson that so many women of an earlier generation imbibed somewhere along the line? I think of my mother—not an artist by any means—but a woman who created all her life: the meals we ate and the clothes we wore, the bedspreads and curtains and floor rugs, the flowers and fruit and herbs she grew in her gardens, and after we’d all left home, the years spent doing decoupage. In Preston’s legacy, so clearly explicated and illustrated here, is an example for us all.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing Limited for a digital ARC of this book. These are my notes and thoughts about the book.


Margaret Preston: Recipes for Food and Art ~ Lesley Harding

The Miegunyah Press
Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Margaret Preston was one of Australia's most celebrated and beloved artists. She was a lifelong student of art. Her maiden name was McPherson (also spelled Macpherson).
Photo of Margaret Rose McPherson painting flowers in vases in her Adelaide studio in 1909.
Photo of her at her home in Mosman in 1924.
She did much of her art at home and during her career of over 60 years she taught classes, published books, lectured and made public broadcasts on radio.
She was born in Port Adelaide, South Australia on April 29, 1875 to David and Prudence Cleverton (nee Lyle).
At age 12 she displayed her artistic expression by painting flowers on porcelain dinner plates after blacking them. She studied art under the guidance of William Lister, Madame Berthe Mouchette, Bernard Hall and HP Gill.
Margaret McPherson supported herself by teaching art and painting portraits, although her preferred genre was 'still life'.
This book has pictures of Margaret McPherson, her artwork and paintings, and recipes from her recipe and scrapbook. I want to try the Cheese Biscuits (page 55), Lemon Butter (page 25) and Fish Croquettes (page 121). I love the print of her oil on canvas painting titled 'Hibiscus' of 1925 (page 219 of 370).
In 1904, Margaret McPherson accompanied by student and companion, Bessie Davidson, moved to Munich and on to Paris where they studied and taught art and sold their paintings. They visited England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Morocco, Belgium and Spain before returning to Adelaide.
Along with former pupil, Gladys Reynell, Margaret McPherson returned to London and Paris and reconnected with various artists including Rupert Bunny. They taught art school in London and Southern Ireland. They enrolled part time in a school of crafts and art in London and learned about ceramics, and then worked in a pottery studio in Cornwall. They then worked for Gladys' brother, Rupert with a rehabilitation program for 'rank and file' soldiers at a military hospital near Devon, teaching them basket weaving, pottery and other handcrafts.
On December 31, 1919 Margaret Rose McPherson married William George Preston in Adelaide. They honeymooned in Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands and then lived in Mosman and moved to beautiful Berowra where they lived from 1932 to 1939. In 1939 they moved to Mosman.
Preston tried to stay in the public limelight by giving interviews to the popular press and writing articles about art and crafts and travelogues about the many places around the world where she and William traveled in the 1920's and 1930's before and after she was successfully treated for cancer.
Renown publisher and painter, "Ure Smith famously commented that Preston was 'the natural enemy of the dull'." He featured her art and articles about her in his many publications, even on the cover.
"Over the years she practised the arts of pottery, printmaking (woodblock printing, silkscreens, monotypes and stencils), basket weaving and textile design;"
Margaret Preston wrote series of instructional texts. She believed that housewives could engage in making their own art - pottery, printmaking, flower arranging, weave baskets, painting. She designed and made floor rugs for her home and as wedding gifts for special friends.
She held an exhibition containing 29 of her works and it was a "sell-out" by the end of the first day. She died in 1963.
The book ends with an extensive biography, image credits, a recipe index and a well detailed and designed index.
I was fascinated with Margaret's life story and enjoyed looking at pictures of her and her artwork. 5 artistic stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed that. I’ve always loved Preston’s prints and it’s interesting to understand her evolution and influences. The art/food approach is similar to Sunday’s Kitchen but the writing and story of Preston’s life is so compelling that I read it in a sitting.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it really entertaining as a cook and as a writer, and as someone interested in the history of any of the arts or humanities in Australia. It is popular reading, good for dates and places and people but doesnt go into a lot of depth. It is useful however for putting Margaret Preston within context in the history of art in Australia. As a reader, and personally, I really enjoyed it because I have always believed that crafts being considered of lesser importance than the arts to be a simplification of the skill and commitment and artistic accomplishment of the act of crafting rather than making art. I believe the role that crafts play in the art heart of Australia to be underestimated, in terms of both contributing to and benefiting from each other. The artistic heart of Australian can begin in a garden, or a kitchen, or a imaginatively, courageously and visionary sense of what it is that makes a home that effects the people who exist and grow within it, or play a part in creating it. As a reader too, rather than a critic, I found a lot of pleasure both in her works, and in how she worked. The fact that she had no studio but instead created in her kitchen, on her verandah (referred to interestingly as a porch, which is American, rather than a verandah which is Australian) - her whole home being her studio, it not being a separate place devoted purely to creating. That integration of art into everyday life, to read about, was very satisfying. The integration of recipes enriched this theme - I found it easy to read the recipes as seriously as I read the biographical information as they also said something about Margaret Preston. The recipes illustrated with unjudging eyes plain Australian cookery at the time, and also showed how she attempted to adapt foods she encountered on overseas trips to available Australian ingredients. The book included her recipes and also recipes by a cookery writer of her times who was, according to the author, worth representing as indicative of where Australian cooking was at the time. This, I thought, might have been a bit of a leap but there was reference to Margaret contacting the author re one recipe which didn't work the way it was supposed to. Something about rice somethings not holding together? The book overall had a friendly, domestic feel but one with a foundation of deep commitment to domestic arts and crafts in Australia at that time. In that way it is unique. It spoke intimately of something I could feel a sharing with personal relief and gratification - though not sure that me agreeing with Margaret Preston's belief is of interest to anyone except me and other men and women busily creating homes that feed the soul of their inhabitants as well as their bodies and futures. The art on the living room wall, in the arrangement of fruit or flowers in a bowl, printed on fabrics on clothing and furnishing feeds us differently, but as powerfully, as the isolated pieces of pristine beauty on gallery walls or locked away in vaults as investments. Perhaps more so.

[Lizzet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great and comprehensive book about Margaret Preston. It has a great balance between text, her personal story, her artistic and professional journey and images to back the text.
The addition of the recipes are great, although not overly relevant for all of her periods but never the less interesting. They also provide a window to past eras, inevitably inspiring too.

[John Kidman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must have for your shelves for both the art and the recipes. I’ve tried some of the recipes successfully.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The recipes aren't very interesting, but it's a great little bio of Margaret Preston with some great reproductions of her work.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part biography, part art critique, part cookbook, all Australian.

[Rianna Rowsell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to learn about this artist. I wouldn't cook any of the recipes, but they fit in really well with the subject matter in the artworks. I love Margaret Preston's works, and appreciate her efforts to create an identifiable Australian style.