Artist of the Day, June 26, 2025 : Margaret Watkins, a Canadian photographer (#2315)

Margaret Watkins (1884–1969) was a Canadian photographer who is remembered for her innovative contributions to advertising photography. She was also a pioneering modernist photographer; her still-life images of household objects arranged in compositions influenced by abstract art were highly innovative and influential.

The daughter of an Ontario businessman and his Scottish wife, Watkins was born in Hamilton, Ontario. Growing up, Watkins exhibited a keen eye for design and craftsmanship, and by age 15 she was selling her own crafts in her father’s department store. She also played piano and sang in the Centenary Methodist Church Choir. In 1908 Watkins left home to work at the Roycroft Arts and Crafts community and Sidney Lanier Camp. It was at these two rural utopian communities in northeast United States where she would start to learn photography.

Watkins opened a studio in Greenwich Village, New York City, and in 1920 became editor of the annual publication Pictorial Photography in America. She worked successfully as an advertising photographer for Macy's and the J. Walter Thompson Company and Fairfax, becoming one of the first women photographers to contribute to advertising agencies. She also produced landscapes, portraits, nudes and still lifes. Her portrait subjects included many figures from the art world of New York of the time, including Sergei Rachmaninov, Ezra Winter, and Kenneth Hayes Miller.[2] While teaching at the Clarence White school from 1916 to 1928, her students included Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner and Doris Ulmann.

One of the earliest art photographers in advertising, her images of everyday objects set new standards of acceptability. In 1928, Watkins embarked on a planned three-month holiday to Europe, which ended with her moving permanently to Glasgow, Scotland to care for three ailing aunts. From 1928, when she was based in Glasgow, she embarked on street photography in Russia, Germany and France, specializing in store fronts and displays.

Before she died, Watkins handed over a sealed box of all her work to her neighbor and executor of her will, Joseph Mulholland. She gave him strict instructions to not open it until after she died. The large box, a mini version of the traditional Saratoga trunk, wrapped in brown paper, sealed with red strings, kept guarding almost 700 rolls of film and many photographs for another decade before Mulholland found it again after a few years of Ms. Watkins’ passing. She left a mystery behind and the young man rose to the challenge to give detail to that mystery. She left most of her estate to music charities.

In October 2012, a retrospective exhibition of Margaret Watkins' work titled "Domestic Symphonies" opened at the National Gallery of Canada. This exhibition showcased 95 of her photographs dating from 1914 to 1939, including portraits, landscapes, modern still lifes, street scenes, advertising work, and commercial designs. Music was a vital inspiration for Watkins, as can be seen from the title of the exhibition.

A stamp depicting Watkins' photograph, The Kitchen Sink was issued on March 22, 2013 by Canada Post as part of their Canadian Photography series. The image is a still life of a sink with dishes.

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Ms. Margaret Watkins, Self-Portrait, 1923

Margaret Watkins

Margaret Watkins at work, circa 1915

Josephine in Sunlight, circa 1916

Domestic Symphony, circa 1919 New York

Still Life – Circles, circa  1919

Still Life – Shower Hose, circa 1919

The Bathroom Window [Sun Pattern], circa 1919

The Kitchen Sink, circa 1919

Untitled, circa 1919  Bridge at Canaan, Connecticut

Untitled, circa 1919-25  Jane Street, New York City

Untitled (Watkins’s Graflex Camera), circa 1920–22

Untitled, (Kitchen, Still Life), circa 1921

The Princess, circa 1921

Angles (The Wharf), circa 1922

Portrait Study (Verna Skelton), circa 1923

The Woodbury Soap, circa 1924

Untitled (Portrait of a Man), circa 1924

Untitled (Verna Skelton Posing for Cutex Advertisement), circa 1924 New York

Ellipse & Triangle, circa 1924–28

Tests Tubes, circa 1924-28  New York

Katherine at Home, circa 1925

London (Daily Express), circa 1928

Untitled (Pressa Fair), circa 1928

Untitled (Construction), circa 1928–38  Glasgow

Untitled (Bridge and Eiffel Tower), circa 1931

From the Finnieston crane, looking down, circa 1932–38

Moscow, circa 1933

Reconstruction, circa 1933 Moscow

Untitled (Octobrist camp),  circa 1933

Self-Portrait (Shadows),  circa 1935  Glasgow