signed and titled lower left
17.75 x 25 in (45.1 x 63.5 cm)
(including Buyer's Premium)
Canadian Fine Arts, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Margaret Campbell Macpherson (1860–1931) was an influential Canadian artist recognized for her portraits, landscapes, and still-life paintings. Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, into a prominent merchant family, she emerged as one of the earliest Newfoundland-born women to establish an international artistic career. Over the course of more than three decades, she exhibited extensively in Europe and North America and became one of the most successful Canadian women artists represented at the Paris Salons, where her work was accepted numerous times between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the early 1890s, Macpherson expanded her training in Paris, studying with respected academic painters Gustave Courtois and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. She also spent time in Concarneau, Brittany, an important artists’ community whose creative environment influenced her work. Her paintings from this period reflect both realist traditions and emerging impressionist tendencies.
Today, Macpherson’s paintings are represented in major Canadian collections, including those of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and Library and Archives Canada. Renewed scholarly interest and retrospective exhibitions have helped re-establish her importance within Canadian art history. She died in Versailles, France, on May 16, 1931, leaving behind a significant legacy as one of Newfoundland’s pioneering professional women artists.
