The craft of art: 1901-1911

In the 1890s, Preston studied at the prestigious National Gallery School in Melbourne where she was taught the academic tonal technique of painting. This routinely involved placing the darkest tones and background shadows and carefully blending up to lighter tones before finally painting in the impasto highlights. Preston’s earliest known paintings reveal her initial desire to paint domestic objects ‘with such fidelity to nature that they could almost be used in the kitchen.’

The foundations of such sombre illusionism were shaken by her first trip to Europe (1904-06) and exposure to German Successionist and Fauves paintings. Returning to Adelaide she worked to bring ‘design in colour to realism’ and was claimed by 1911 as ‘probably unequalled in Australia in the department of still lifes’.