Margaret Cochrane Scott b. 25 June 1825

Also known as Margaret Cochrane Little
  • Artist (Cartoonist / Illustrator),
  • Artist (Painter)
Late colonial-era Adelaide painter and cartoonist. Most of her art work appears to have been small in scale with numerous flower studies painted on green paper only a few centimetres square. Despite their size Scott's works were well-regarded and purchasers of her work included the Duchess of Cornwall and York who was later to become Queen Mary.

painter and cartoonist, was born on 25 June 1825, the most artistically talented of the numerous children of a wealthy merchant of Liverpool, Lancashire. She left Liverpool with her family in 1853, bound for Adelaide, and kept a lively shipboard diary on the voyage out. The Littles first lived at Park Cottage, near the South Australian Company’s mill at Hackney and close to the newly opened Adelaide Botanic Gardens, but most of the family, including Margaret, soon moved to a property near Yankalilla. Some of the sons stayed in Adelaide and went into partnership with Captain William Scott of Brookside; the merchants Scott & Little operated in the Adelaide suburb of Alberton until the 1880s.

Margaret Cochrane Little and her sister Mary Fyfe (1827-1912) had several paintings in the South Australian Society of Arts’ 1859 exhibition. Margaret’s were Runaway Match and Last Resting Place of an Explorer , while Grandfather’s Watch (in a cherrywood frame) and Looking into the Future (blackwood frame) were attributed to Mary. All were lent by Margaret. One of her brothers is also said to have drawn views of Port Lincoln and Port Pirie in the 1850s but did not persist with this interest. In 1861 Margaret Little married David Wylie Scott (1817-87), one of the partners of Scott & Little. For a few years they lived in the Barossa Valley; their only child, Winnifred Julia Purton Scott (1865-1950), was born there. David inherited Brookside when his father died, and this became Margaret’s home until 1893.

All Margaret Scott’s art work appears to have been small in scale and numerous flower studies were painted on green paper only a few centimetres square. Most were in watercolour although a few oils, considered rather sombre, are mentioned by Horsnell. Her earliest subjects were portrait miniatures, of which only one of three recorded examples has been located (p.c.). In the 1870s she is said to have provided humorous cartoons in pen-and-ink for Ephemera , a small Port Adelaide newspaper; the issue for 1874 (ML) contains a badly double-printed view of some country bumpkins visiting an art exhibition titled “The world and his wife visit the Adelaide Institution” and “Where every body may see himself as others see him”.

Scott primarily painted watercolours of South Australian wildflowers. Many of the specimens in her album (Botanic Gardens, Adelaide) were collected in the 1870s around Horsnell’s Gully and she frequently painted the living flower where it grew. Although she seems to have continued to exhibit sporadically with the South Australian Society of Arts (records are incomplete), her public career as a painter did not really begin until after her husband died, when she was 62. Then it continued for almost 30 years.

From 1887 onwards, on the advice of Viscountess Kintore (wife of the governor of South Australia), Scott devoted herself exclusively to painting Australian wildflowers, for which she gained an international reputation. Included in the noted 1898 Australian Art Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London, her Jarrah Blossom was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald to have been one of the first pictures sold. Lady Kintore purchased several sets of her flowers at the May Club exhibition in 1902. Others, at least some of which had been painted many years earlier, were acquired by the Duchess of Cornwall and York (later Queen Mary) when she visited Adelaide. She is said to be represented in the Glasgow Art Gallery. A hand-painted table top is in a private collection in South Australia, as are the majority of her paintings.

From 1893 until 1904 Margaret Scott lived at Rock Tavern, below Norton Summit, and continued to paint flowers, travelling to them as she had done for many years in a small governess cart. From 1904 until her death in 1919, aged 93, she lived in Rose Cottage at Marryatville with Winnifred, who wrote under the pseudonym 'Magpie’ for the Adelaide Observer and was also a talented watercolour painter.

Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Staff Writer
Date written:
1992
Last updated:
1989