Guy Butler
If known at all, Sister Margaret of the Community of the Resurrection of Our Lord, Grahamstown, is known as the painter of one picture, the splendid mural in the apse of St Mary and All the Angels, the Chapel of Rhodes University. It was painted between 1924 to 1928. She painted mainly for mission churches, never for art galleries or exhibitions.
By good fortune, I had seen another, greater work of hers, in the Church of Christ the King, Sophiatown, in which she had depicted St Francis kneeling, with a mine dump and head-gear in the background.
Three years ago I started researching her life and work and thought I had finished the task by completing my book on her. Then, Madge Stormont volunteered that she knew something not generally known about the artist nun.
The accepted account was that the community (like most) did not encourage its members to indulge any personal talents. Margaret Watson, having decided to become a missionary in Africa, had taken a special course in mural painting, in the belief that the church would use paintings for the benefit of illiterate people. Instead, she spent 13 years doing humble jobs in orphanages before her talents were used to paint the apse of the chapel.
Stormont had, however, seen landscape paintings done before the apse work, on the farm Everton in Queenstown – an oil from Nonesi’s Nek and a watercolour of willows and poplars.
In the early 1920s, Donald Hart, a great lover of paintings, heard that a Sister, Margaret CR, working at home for unmarried mothers, was suffering from an illness from which she could not recover. Hart approached Mother Florence and persuaded her to allow Sister Margaret to recuperate on his farm Everton, with freedom to paint to her heart’s content.
While there, she painted at least two pictures. Hart’s daughter, now in the United Kingdom) has the watercolour. She could offer no help as to the whereabouts of the oil. A Mr Hodgkiss (who succeeded Hart as owner of Everton) did not know either, but suggested I try the auctioneers who conducted the Everton sale in 1978, but they admitted defeat.
As a last chance, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Queenstown Representative, giving the details of the picture. I received a letter from Ms Wilson of the farm Wilsley. She and her husband had attended the sale, saw the picture and liked it, but were distracted at the crucial moment during which it was sold. To whom? As no one else bid for it, the auctioneer had bought it for himself, for R1. Would he be prepared to sell it? Yes, for R1!
The picture is of particular interest. It shows her power as a landscape painter. But more important, it may have proved that Margaret Watson was an excellent painter, who could be entrusted with painting the apse.