Margaret Clark

painter and illustrator, was born in Plattsburg (now Wallsend) near Newcastle and grew up in Sydney. In 1918, aged sixteen, she was commissioned to paint miniature fairy pictures to decorate the boxes of an exclusive line of sweets for the large confectionery manufacturers, Sweetacres. The firm advertised their new product in a special pamphlet which promoted Clark's paintings as having 'versatility of fancy and capacity for infinite detail and imagery'.

Despite this early success, Margaret Clark had a short professional career as an artist. She attended Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School but for only one term. Her first published illustration appeared in Young Australia in November 1923, her last--two large coloured friezes--in Australian Childhood in 1930. Her exhibiting career was even shorter: in 1924 she showed five fairy paintings with the Sydney Society of Women Painters and in 1926 held a solo exhibition at the Sydney Art Salon. All her pictures sold. A critic in the Daily Telegraph compared them favourably with those of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite: 'these are by no means copies of the work of others; they are entirely original, and show in many cases much better drawing and imagination than many other exhibitors in this branch of art.'

Margaret Clark disappeared from public view following her marriage to Clifford Stanfield in 1929. Her work was not exhibited again until 1985 when an exhibition of original work by children's illustrators, then owned by the James Hardie Library, was shown at Sydney's S.H. Ervin Gallery. Three years later, the Hardie collection was transferred to the NSW National Trust's Museum of Childhood.

Anita Callaway.