Rago Auctions

Although raised in Boston, Massachusetts and Maine, Margaret Jordan Patterson was born aboard a ship in Surabaya, East Java in 1867 because her father was a sea captain. This early exposure to the vibrancy of nature, and coastal scenes in particular, appears to have stayed with Patterson on her way to becoming an artist. After taking a correspondence course with Louis Prang, Patterson studied at the Pratt Institute in New York City as well as with the Spanish painters Claudio Castellucho in Florence and Ermengildo Anglada-Camrasa in Paris. Back in America, the artist Ethel Mars taught Patterson to make color woodcut prints in 1910 and this became Patterson's preferred medium.

Generally, Patterson's bright compositions include trees, flowers, and a range of landscapes, frequently with bodies of water. Her woodcuts show a deep understanding of color balance and she uses high relief to produce a dreamlike realism. Patterson was awarded for her artwork at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Along with being a prolific artist, Patterson taught for many years at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts and public schools elsewhere in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Prior to her death in Boston in 1950, Patterson had exhibited widely and several important institutions now hold examples of her work, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In recent years, collectors have increasingly come to admire the graceful nuance of Patterson's oeuvre, with her compositions garnering higher prices at auction.