Margaret Coen: Watercolour Artist Who Captured Sydney
- neighbourhoodmedia
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
From Bohemian beginnings with Norman Lindsay to decades of artistic brilliance in St Ives, Margaret Coen’s vivid flower studies and serene Australian landscapes secured her legacy in Australia’s cultural canon.
By ALEC SMART
Margaret Coen (1909-1993), who lived most of her adult life on Sydney’s Upper North Shore in St Ives, was a successful artist who specialised in watercolours. She is renowned for her still-lifes (she enjoyed painting colourful arrangements of flowers), landscapes and portraits, and several of her artworks are displayed in major galleries, including the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Australia.
Her personal letters are also archived in national collections because she was a close friend of one of Australia’s most influential artists, Norman Lindsay, an important mentor who introduced young Margaret to watercolour painting.
Margaret Coen's Personal History
In 1945, she married poet and playwright Douglas Stewart (1913-1985), who was, for 20 years, the Literary Editor of The Bulletin magazine.
They had one daughter, writer and filmmaker Meg Stewart, who still resides in their St Ives family home. Meg kindly spoke to us for this article, sharing details of her mother’s life story.
Born in Yass to Irish immigrants, Margaret Coen moved to Randwick at a young age and attended Kincoppal in Elizabeth Bay, an independent Roman Catholic school for girls.
She showed early promise with her artistic talent and attended lessons by Antonio Datillo-Rubbo, the celebrated and flamboyant Italian-born art teacher from the Naples Art Academy, who gave art classes in selective schools across Sydney, and at the Royal Art Society of NSW.
From 1898, the year after he arrived in Sydney, Datillo-Rubbo taught at St Joseph's, Scots College, Kambala, Newington College as well as Kincoppal. He gave his pupils nicknames, and according to his grandson Mark, he dubbed young Margaret Coen ‘Gunner’, because he predicted that one day she would go, “boom, boom!”, in an explosion of artistic talent.
Datillo-Rubbo was not distinguished as a painter (although 130 of his works are in the Manly Art Gallery & Museum, which he founded), but he was highly influential in introducing a generation of young Australians to Modernism. He further encouraged experimentation and abstract expression via mediums such as Post-Impressionism (with luminaries Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet and Paul Gaugin) and Cubism (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque). These influences can be seen in some of Coen’s artworks.
In a 2022 interview with the National Trust, Meg revealed her mum, “was very lucky to have Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo as her art teacher. The nuns recognised her talent and actually, when the family couldn't afford them anymore, they paid for her art lessons to continue.”
After graduating from high school Coen attended drawing classes four nights a week at the Royal Art Society of NSW in Pitt Street, as well as continuing her lessons with Datillo-Rubbo. Coen also found work as a commercial artist in the City.
I asked Meg about her mother’s reported talent for drawing from memory. She revealed: “This was when I was a baby and she had to look after me and, since we living in a city flat, this meant going out on excursions such as ferry rides or walking up to the Botanic Gardens.
“Because I was so little she could not really draw [in detail] at that time so she would draw what she had seen while we were out and then when she came home, and I was presumably asleep, recreate it…. She never went anywhere without a sketch book; in her later years she would even take a sketch book with her when she was a patient in hospital.”
Meeting her mentor
Sometime in 1929, when she was aged 20, Coen travelled up to Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains with two friends to meet the celebrated artist Norman Lindsay and his wife, the famous model Rose Soady, at their home studio.
Lindsay, author of the comic fantasy children’s book The Magic Pudding (published 1918), was renowned as a talented painter, sculptor, etcher, cartoonist and illustrator as well as a writer and critic.
Did she model for Lindsay on their first meeting, or approach him for artistic advice?
“Mum always said that the first time she went to ‘Springwood’, as we always referred to the Lindsay property in the Blue Mountains, that Norman did a watercolour painting - just a head study - of her and the woman who was visiting with her,” Meg revealed.
“Mum had been hearing about Norman and wanting to meet him since she was a schoolgirl… Mum also said that what really impressed her on that first visit to Springwood was to see how Norman worked with watercolours. He showed her how to put down a watercolour wash and she came away determined to be a watercolour artist herself. Her introduction to the medium of watercolour is the really crucial point about her first meeting with Norman.”
Becoming a professional
A regular contributor of cartoons to The Bulletin magazine, a trustee of the National Art Gallery of NSW and former president of the Australian Painter-Etchers' Society, Norman Lindsay lived a ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle. However, due to his love of painting naked women in bawdy scenes inspired by Greek mythology, and his risqué fiction (his 1930 novel Redheap was banned) he was frequently censored and derided as a pornographer.
The 1994 film Sirens, starring Sam Neil, Tara Fitzgerald and Hugh Grant (and 'supermodel' Elle Macpherson in her film debut), is inspired by Norman Lindsay’s creative works and was filmed at his Faulconbridge home.
The film features a lot of nude models, unrestrained passion and sapphic intimacy. Was this accurate of the 'Bohemian' lifestyle of Lindsay, his muses and his wife Rose, or a fanciful exaggeration closer to his Greek myths-inspired paintings than real life?
“I was not around for the heyday of whatever bohemian high-jinx took place at Springwood,” Meg said. “Rose did love parties – and I’m sure there were some wild ones – and she was at great entertaining visitors. Norman, on the other hand, in fact, was usually trying to escape from most visitors and just wanted to get on with work uninterrupted. So, I would think there was a degree of fanciful exaggeration to Sirens.
“By the time Mum and Dad were staying there in the 1940s, there was a still a Bohemian atmosphere but Norman was in his 60s then and generally things around him were quite quiet. At night when Mum and Dad were staying there, Mum would read the works of writers like Dickens aloud to them. By the time I first knew Norman he was in his seventies and there was no unrestrained passion or Sapphic intimacy at Springwood outside artworks.”
Although his principal muse was his wife Rose (probably Australia’s most-painted woman), Lindsay utilised a collection of art models from which he sketched poses that were incorporated into his larger compositions. His biographer Lin Bloomfield estimates that between 1930 and 1940, Lindsay employed 140 models.
Margaret Coen reportedly appears in several of his artworks, notably The Party (1933).
“She is generally acknowledged to be the woman in Happiness,” Meg revealed. “Painted in 1933, Happiness is a lovely water colour in which she is depicted standing in a garden with a white peacock perched nearby and which is now part of the Howard Hinton collection at NERAM (New England Regional Art Museum).
“I’m sure Norman drew Mum often, and her face and body do appear in a number of his works, but she never considered herself an artists’ model and was always determined to be an artist.”
In 1934, Lindsay began renting a studio at 12 Bridge St, close to Circular Quay and based himself in the city. Around this time Margaret Coen found her own calling as a respected painter. Her friendship with Lindsay blossomed and at one stage (during Lindsay’s separation from Rose, his second wife), the pair were lovers, despite him being 30 years her senior.
How long did their affair last?
“Because neither Mum nor Norman ever talked about their love affair it’s impossible to know this for sure. Norman moved into the Bridge Street studio in 1934. Mum had her own painting studio where she worked most days at 38A Pitt Street, not far away and was still living with her parents at Randwick. She often came over at the end of day and helped Norman clean up after his day’s painting and also helped him by arranging for the various models he wished to paint for whatever composition he was working on to pose for him. Mum met my father in 1938 and by 1939 was beginning to become involved with him.
“So, somewhere in that four-year period, what had begun as a flirtation between Mum and Norman sometime earlier, perhaps soon after their first meeting, changed from a love affair into a deep friendship and abiding friendship that included my father. Norman had enormous respect for my father as a poet and was deeply encouraging of his writing as he was of Mum’s painting.
“To sum up: the love affair was relatively brief, the friendship long-lasting.”
After Lindsay returned to Faulconbridge in 1940, Coen took custody of his 12 Bridge St studio and continued her painting there. In 1945 she married Douglas Stewart (having waited until the end of World War II), and they initially lived in a flatette in Potts Point.
When Coen became pregnant with Meg, they realised the Potts Point flatette was too small to raise a child, so the couple relocated to the 2-room studio and began living there shortly before Meg Stewart was born. Douglas continued working for The Bulletin magazine (for which he’d been Literary Editor since 1940), which was now conveniently close in George St.
“They moved in there at the end of 1947 just before I was born in January 1948,” Meg confirmed. “12 Bridge belonged to the Huddart Parker shipping company building so it was a commercial type old-fashioned city building rather than a Paddington-style terrace. It had three floors... A flight of stairs from there led to the roof where there was a communal clothes line.
“My father, in his memoir of Norman Lindsay, wrote that he thought you could have climbed over the rooftops from building to building from George Street right along to Pitt Street in those days. There had been artists renting rooms there since at least the 1930s... Above us on the third floor, until my persistent crying as a baby soon drove her out, was the artist Adelaide Perry.”
Just before Meg turned six, in December 1953, the trio relocated to St Ives, then a semi-rural forested suburb dominated by market gardens in Sydney’s far north. They settled into a house in Banool Ave, which became Coen’s home studio where she hosted art classes and became a prolific painter.
“All her life she loved painting landscapes, whether in the bush, or at the beach or even inner-city suburbs with old buildings such as Balmain, and she always worked in situ,” Meg revealed. “Every year, when I was growing up, we went for three weeks to the Snowy Mountains in January. Dad and I went trout fishing and Mum painted, she especially loved the ‘blue’ bush there. She had to battle the March flies particularly on these trips and used to wrap her legs up in blankets to keep her from biting her!
“Before that in the 1930s and ‘40s she often painted around the harbour and did landscapes of suburbs like Balmain. In the ‘40s when she stayed at Springwood she did landscapes of the gullies and a waterfall in the bush surrounding the property there…
“One of the reasons why we moved to St. Ives was that it was so close to the bush and the Northern Beaches, such as Mona Vale…
“Apart from a proximity to landscape, the other aspect of living in St. Ives that was special to Mum was that for the first time in her life she was able to have a garden of her own… It was much, much better for her have a whole range of subjects growing in her own garden. She loved watching what she called the ‘movement’ of flowers. ‘Flowers have a life of their own,’ she said. ‘Flowers aren’t static; they move. It’s fantastic how some flowers move.’…
“Jane Glad, Norman Lindsay’s daughter, who was great friends with Mum, has also described how in those days Mum would also bring up bunches of flowers from the city to paint with Norman in the studio there.
“Because she had subjects so close at hand at St. Ives, over the years her work became much freer. In her early watercolours, she drew very carefully in pencil but over the years at St. Ives, she came to just draw with her brush. ‘You have to be in complete control of your technique before you can free yourself,’ was how she explained it.”
I read an interview with Meg in which she revealed her mum painted a lot of portraits of her with her school friends when they were teenagers in the 1960s. In how many of paintings did Meg feature?
“Lots!” she admitted. “I honestly have never counted them but there were many, many. I also sometimes used to sit for the once-a-week art class for women that she held in the house here.”
How many of Margaret Coen's paintings feature scenes from around St Ives?
“She lived at St. Ives for nearly forty years,” Meg replied, “and, until ill-health stopped her for the last two years of her life, she was painting often every day of the week - that’s a lot of paintings. Not all the paintings of those forty years, either landscapes or flower painting, were St. Ives-inspired, and it’s hard to estimate, but I would say perhaps sixty percent or more were. One of her most-loved paintings is called The Moon over Ku-ring-gai. My father loved this work so much that he bought it from her as soon as it was finished so it wouldn’t leave the house.”
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