Margaret Preston

Still life and flowers 1916–19
woodcut, printed in colour in gouache in the Japanese manner, from multiple blocks; undesignated impression
National Gallery of Australia
Purchased from Gallery admission charges 1987
© Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2024

This work is one of a very small number printed in, as Preston herself described, ‘the Japanese manner’ during her years abroad. It reveals her early experimentation with this method: the solid black outline, restrained colouration, flattened perspective, and vertical signature block echo particularly some elements in the hand-coloured prints by Hishikawa Moronobu who, more than a decade later, Preston was to single out as the ‘great Japanese wood colour blocker’ in her 1930 article ‘Wood-blocking as a craft’, published in Art in Australia.