Author(s): National Gallery of Australia

Australian Art

Over a 60-year working life Margaret Preston (1875-1963) established herself as one of Australia's best-known artists. Her bright decorative prints of distinctively Australian subjects have delighted the public since the early 1920s. The National Gallery's 1987 publication The prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonne was a historic event, being the first monograph the Gallery published on an individual artist, and also the first catalogue raisonne it produced. Following its publication, many more Preston works were discovered, and this new expanded edition reproduces a number of these prints for the first time while also filling some gaps in previous biographies, particularly on the period up Preston's marriage in 1919. The emphasis throughout is on Preston as printmaker--her techniques and the influences on her work.