Margaret Stoddart
Born 1865, Margaret Olrog Stoddart is arguably New Zealand's best known flower painter. Born in Diamond Harbour, Canterbury, she enrolled as a foundation student at the Canterbury College of Art in 1882 and became one of New Zealand's first professional women artists.
Following a successful solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1894, Stoddart travelled to Europe and made her base at the artists' colony at St Ives, Cornwall where she met Frances Hodgkins and Dorothy Kate Richmond. Working at St Ives, the centre for contemporary English impressionists and landscape painters, encouraged Stoddart to add landscape painting to her own oeuvre and she introduced a theme that she was to develop into the impressionist gardens, spring blossoms and seasonal studies which became a major feature of her later work. While abroad she exhibited at the Baillie Gallery in London and also held exhibitions at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Royal Society of British Artists in London.
Stoddart returned to Christchurch in 1906. A short time later she began teaching at the Canterbury School of Art, later taking on pupils in Nelson. She was one of the first New Zealand painters to source inspiration and new ideas from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. She enjoyed painting outdoor landscapes and is well known for her expressive, broad handling of watercolour.
Stoddart is represented in all major New Zealand museums and many private collections. She died in 1934.