In New Zealand’s art history, watercolourist Margaret Stoddart’s name has become synonymous with intricate flower studies and delicately rendered landscapes. Perhaps though, she should equally be connotated with dedication and a unique spirit of adventure, which informed her impressive career spanning over five decades.

Margaret Olrog Stoddart (1865-1934) spent her earlier years in Canterbury, where she was a foundation pupil at the newly established Canterbury College School of Art in 1882. An eager curiosity about the natural world was fostered during hours in the garden with her two sisters at the charming Stoddart family home in Diamond Harbour, on the picturesque shore of Banks Peninsula. Stoddart’s interest in native fauna was encouraged in her early studies at the college, where each week different plant varieties would be the subject of sketching. During these years, Stoddart became an early member of the Christchurch-based Palette Club, a group that formed in 1889, as a collective of artists inspired to work en plein air and paint outdoors amongst nature.

Stoddart emerged from this group to become a truly prolific landscape painter, in her careful study and exploration of the genre. She produced two early examples of what can only be described as artist books in the late 1890s – now both held in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhētu. The older, compiled lovingly between 1886–96, is a considered personal collection of photographs which are laid upon delicately illustrated pages of botanical sketches and symbolic watercolour renderings. An air of tactility is felt on every page, as she brings to life native plants and small details from places visited during her extensive travels. Stoddart’s visits to the Chatham Islands, the Southern Alps, abroad in Tasmania and Victoria, Australia, are all captured in these volumes, amongst various places she explored around Canterbury.

An affluent homelife and the unwavering support of her parents allowed Stoddart the freedom to travel in this way and to experiment with watercolour painting full-time. She remained unmarried and her dedication to both adventure and artmaking, was decidedly revolutionary in paving the way for renowned women to pursue art thereafter. In the first years of the twentieth century, Stoddart made her first of many visits to Europe, where she would later travel to small towns on painting holidays with expatriates Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) and Dorothy Richmond (1861-1935).

Across Britain and France, she closely studied the evolution of landscape in the work of the Impressionists and PostImpressionists, while exhibiting her own work at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Watercolours and the renowned Salon in Paris (between 1909-1914). The Impressionistic interpretations of the natural world, which later became more expressive with the introduction of Post Impressionism, clearly had influence on her oeuvre in equal measure, as did the enduring focus on the everchanging effects of light in painting.

So diligent was Stoddart’s study of the landscape genre, that it was the unwavering pursuit of her lifetime approached with both a forensic and aesthetic curiosity. Varying stages of impressionistic influence can be found in her own landscapes, which oscillate between scenes peppered with botanical and architectural details and signs of life, to breathy indications of form that prompt one to narrow the eyes in attempt to see more clearly.

Stoddart’s later paintings exude a quiet charm and confidence, highlighted with a characteristic full signature residing proudly in the lefthand corner, developed from the faint initials found in her more tentative works. These watercolours evoke a feeling of lightness; on shimmering water, as speckled through treetops and in the gentle crispiness of clear sunshine hitting Southland hillsides.

MADELEINE GIFFORD

Private Collection