The Little Known Talents of Margaret Thompson

Essay by Victoria Munn

Horses, egg tempera on paper, 1940

Although her name is not strongly established in the canon of New Zealand art history, Margaret Thompson (1924-2023) enjoyed a successful career as an art teacher and artist in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her oeuvre reflects an insistence on constantly developing her style and engages with an impressive variety of media and genres. Although, following her marriage to David Harvey in 1956, archival material shows the artist using the surname Thompson Harvey, she continued to sign her works with the name Margaret Thompson.

Between 1938 and 1942, Thompson was a full-time student at Elam School of Arts in Auckland. By all accounts, this was a definitive time for Thompson, during which she studied alongside a number of more senior artists, including Olivia Spencer Bower and Pauline Yearbury. At Elam, Thompson was taught by established artists such as John Weeks and Lois White, who greatly influenced her artistic development and style. In particular, Thompson’s early work demonstrates the strong stylistic impact of White’s instruction. Paintings such as Horses (1940) and Moses and the Brazen Serpent (1942) exhibit clear similarities with White’s compositional design, especially the sense of circular movement created by the arrangement of the figures, and the shapes of vibrant colour which completely fill the picture.

Portrait of Merle, oil on board, 1948

Like much of White’s celebrated oeuvre, Thompson’s early works demonstrate a particular interest in tonal modelling, a feature that both artists attributed to the mentorship of A. J. C. Fisher, director of Elam School of Arts from 1924. Fisher also entrusted Thompson with part-time, and later full-time, teaching work at Elam, which began when she was just sixteen years of age. This was the beginning of Thompson’s lengthy teaching career, during which she spent many years at Elam as well as tutoring at the Auckland Society of Arts.

In 1949, Thompson was awarded a travelling scholarship by the New Zealand Association of Art Societies, enabling her to spend two years travelling in Europe and the United Kingdom, including studying London’s Central School of Arts. During this time, Thompson shrewdly opted to focus on areas of artistic practice for which substantial training was not available in New Zealand. Among them were calligraphy and stained glass work, in which Thompson was learning from acclaimed figures in the field such as the stained glass artist Francis Spear.

Angel, egg tempera on board, c.1950s

Upon her return to New Zealand, Thompson regularly undertook commissions for church decoration, including painting altarpieces, embroidering altar frontals and designing church interior schemes. As early as the 1940s, when she painted a triptych depicting the Transfiguration of Christ for the Hobsonville Air Force Base, Thompson engaged with religious subject matter. Thompson pinpointed several drivers for this, including her personal faith, and the influence of Lois White, whose work also encompassed biblical subjects. Moreover, from an early age Thompson was drawn to medieval and Renaissance Christian art and, inspired by the ‘lasting brilliance’ of works in tempera, employed the medium in her own practice.

Alongside religious subjects, the landscape genre also constituted a substantial part of Thompson’s output. This began under Weeks’ tutelage at Elam, and she continued to receive landscape commissions after her return from Europe. Thompson preferred to work in situ, perceiving this to result in a more ‘honest’ depiction of the landscape. Thompson’s command of the watercolour medium – also developed under Weeks – surely facilitated this approach. From Brick Bay Road, Mahurangi (1983) shows Thompson exploiting the medium, using the varying density of colour to create compositional depth, and her seemingly quick strokes investing the landscape with dynamism.

From Brick Bay Road, Mahurangi, watercolour on paper, 1983

Especially in the 1980s, Thompson’s work changed significantly as she embraced abstraction. But even though Thompson described herself moving away from a planned structure, embracing a ‘freer’ working process, her later abstract works still reflect her instinct for compositional design, and the bold use of colour that permeates much of her oeuvre.

In 1989, Thompson lost sight in her left eye and, with only limited vision in her right eye, painting became difficult. However, a document in her artist’s file in the E. H. McCormick Research Library, in which she has noted errors and made corrections to writing about her work, suggests she retained a strong sense of her artistic identity and position in New Zealand art history.