Margaret Thomas Still-life Paintings

Margaret Thomas was a modern British painter who trained in the inter-war years at both the Slade and the Royal College of Art in London. She was part of a generation of female artists who challenged inequality in the academies. In 1943 she exhibited her first oil painting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. She went on to exhibit at the Royal Academy for another 46 consecutive years.

A lyrical painter, essentially in the English tradition, Margaret loved to paint still-life compositions, particularly flowers. Toward the end of her life, her studio was full of vases and pots and bunches of dried and rather beautiful faded flowers; her friends, as she called them. Her paintings are littered with objects that shaped her life as an artist — a postcard of a particular exhibition she had visited or a piece of antique fabric that had hung in her nursery as a child. Colors, patterns and memories that inspired her and became part of her narrative. Always working in oil paints, her exterior influences roamed between London, Norfolk and Edinburgh where she had homes. Earlier works often included figures but as she developed her own style the figurative narratives became less direct. It was more about the harmony in a piece and a reduced palette of slate greys, blues and pinks.

Margaret was known to cite Braque and Philip Wilson Steer as early influences in her work, and the creative tension produced between these two giants led to what she termed as "a long tug-o-war" in her studio. The result was a flow of paintings that evoked this mid-century history of an interest in an almost abstract form and an undeniable modern British palette.

Despite a constant subject matter Margaret never repeated herself. One of her favorite flowers, a winter cyclamen, could be viewed in a fresh angle and a new light at every turn of her brush or palette knife. Returning most frequently to the motif of a dying flower, she draws endless inspiration from these spiky, spectral and sculptural presences. "Fading, dried, left to themselves, flowers begin to die from the beginning. When picked they must be left alone to fulfil their destinies, to orientate to the light, to sort out their relative strengths, to stabilize and to mature. They cannot be arranged. All this I seek to show in my paintings."

Represented by leading art gallery Messums in London, Margaret continued to hold solo exhibitions with the gallery up to the last few years of her life. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Government Art Collection UK, the National Galleries of Scotland, Oxford University and Lloyd's of London.

Find original Margaret Thomas paintings on 1stDibs.