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Beauty in Truth The Botanical Art of Margaret Stone The following is an extract from article that originally appeared in The Botanical Artist - Volume 16, Issue 3Elsie Margaret Stones and the Flora of Louisiana By Elaine B. Smyth Melbourne, Australia, 1945. A young art student turned nurse contracts pneumonia. Doctors prescribe eighteen months of bed rest in hospital. Friends and family visit the impatient patient and find her “going mad with boredom.” They bring her paper, pencils, watercolors, and wild flowers, from the nearby Grampian Mountains, to draw. Thus begins the career of one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished botanical artists, which resulted in the creation of three major bodies of work on three continents. Elsie Margaret Stones – always called Margaret – was born in Colac, Australia, southwest of Melbourne, on August 28, 1920. Her father, Frederick Stones, had been a farmer in the district, and her mother, Agnes, came from nearby Terang. The 1920s and 30s were difficult times in Australia, particularly for farmers, who suffered both economic and social upheaval. The Stones family struggled throughout those decades, moving from place to place as farms failed, sometimes unable to live together.
As a child, Margaret loved to draw and despite the upheaval of those early years, her family encouraged and supported her in her artistic endeavours. After attending Swinburne Girls’ Junior Technical School in Melbourne, she won a three-year scholarship to study Industrial Art at Swinburne Technical College (now Swinburne University of Technology). Already sure of her preferred profession at age fifteen, she entered her occupation in her student records as “artist.” Forced to leave school when her scholarship expired, she earned a living doing commercial art during the day, but continued to study, attending night classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, until World War II intervened. Although Australia entered World War II in 1939, declaring war against Germany, it wasn’t until December 1941 that the war moved into the Pacific. In 1942, as part of the home-front war effort, Stones began working as
Margaret Stones at the Herbarium, Kew1962
a nurse at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. In late 1945, she contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and was hospitalized. The drawings she made of wildflowers while convalescing attracted the attention of her physician, Dr. Clive Fitts. Through his good offices, her work was seen by Daryl Lindsay, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and Robert Haines of Georges Gallery, Melbourne, who gave Stones her first solo exhibition, which opened in December 1946. It was a critical success. In a remarkable burst of productivity, she went on to produce three more gallery exhibitions within four years, while at the same time completing a major commission for a private collector, John McDonnell, attending botany lectures at the University of Melbourne, and spending three summers as part of a botanical expedition to the Bogong High Plains of Victoria. Her time on the Bogong Plains was the result of another important personal connection made by Clive Fitts, who introduced her to John Stewart Turner, Professor of Botany and Plant Physiology at the University of Melbourne. Because of Turner, Stones began not only to study botany and its historical development but also the history of botanical illustration, which she has continued to focus on throughout her life. As her knowledge of botany and botanical illustration grew, she grew determined to work and study at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where distinguished artists had worked with noted botanists since the gardens were founded in 1759. By 1951, she had saved enough to purchase a oneway passage on a ship bound for England. She made the voyage armed with a letter of introduction from Daryl Lindsay to Harold Wright, a Director of Painting
