Mosman Bridge, c.1927

Mosman Art Trail Sign 2 located on footpath cnr Harnett Ave & Centenary Dr.

Listen to an audio recording, read by Claudia Karvan, to learn more about this artwork.

Margaret Preston’s artistic career was stimulated by a progressive attempt to create a style of art that would better illustrate the uniqueness of Australian culture. Her vibrant and distinctive woodblock prints, now regarded as the highpoint of her career, broke with conservative traditions of landscape painting and helped Preston to become the most vocal and highly regarded female modern artist in Australia. Her search for a national vernacular is apparent within her asymmetrical view of Mosman Bridge around 1927, expanded from her earlier treatments of this view to include and highlight Australian native flora in the foreground. Later in life, the artist would make some clumsy attempts to pay homage to First Nations Australians by appropriating elements of Indigenous visual culture into her own work.

In the early 1920s Preston’s career had become very successful and in joining the modern Society of Artists, she could now influence its president Sam Ure-Smith to disseminate her images and ideas in his popular media publications, The Home and Art in Australia. The bold graphic quality of her woodcuts was particularly suited to mass reproduction and Preston advocated their role as home decoration. Printed copies of this woodcut Mosman Bay even accompanied a special deluxe edition of Art in Australia in 1929.¹

Unlike her previous designs of the busy marina of Mosman Bay, Preston’s focus in this print is no longer on the built and industrial environment, crowned by the low pile bridge crossing the bay. Instead she emphasises the natural elements within her composition, notably the plants and harbour water. Although the physical bridge was painted white, Preston depicts it with her now distinctive black outline. She also uses her thick black contour lines to delineate different sections of water in the bay and the shoreline, confusing man made structures with impermanent and intangible natural effects to form uniform zig-zag design of diagonal lines across the page.

Preston sought to tame nature and model it into simplified compositions, with a bold and harmonious design inspired by the techniques of Japanese woodblock printing. Redirecting her focus to faithfully depicted native plants, such as the xanthorrhoea and thick silhouette of a gum that frame this view of Mosman Bridge, Preston shines a light on that which is uniquely Australian in her surrounds. Furthermore, by severely restricting her colour palette, the prevalence of lush greenery at the Mosman foreshore renders the cluster of red roofs, Henry Lawson’s ‘red tiled roofs of comfort’ ², all the more eye-catching and intrusive in the landscape.

Although by 1922 the Prestons had moved from the Musgrave Street flat that had offered them direct views of Mosman Bay, the artist, now living in Park Avenue, still depicted the waterfront in her prints. After having travelled for many years as a young woman, Margaret Preston was happy to settle in Mosman and enjoy its bush sanctuary. Her vision of Mosman depicted in her works was also that of her home, ‘far from the madding crowd in an atmosphere of her own creating’.³

1 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston. A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, first edition, 1987, cat. 113, p.127
2 Lawson, H., Mosman’s Bay, 1900, cited in Souter, G., A History of Mosman, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p.141
3 ‘Margaret Preston. Artist’, The Mail, Adelaide, 18 August 1923, p. 23

Text by Lucie Reeves-Smith.