Born in Soerabaija, Java. Margaret Patterson is remembered primarily for her woodblock prints, most of which are now lost or destroyed. She also worked in both watercolor and oil. Patterson attended school in Boston and taught public school art in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Southbridge, Massachusetts. She taught in the Boston Public Schools for almost twenty years, and in 1915 became the Director of the Art Department at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a position she held for thirty-five years. During her summers, she frequently traveled to Cape Cod. At the Pratt Institute, Arthur Wesley Dow was a major influence on her work. She also studied in Boston with Charles Woodbury, Hermann Dudley Murphy, and Charles Pepper. From 1900 to 1929, she made yearly trips to Europe to sketch for her prints, which were influenced by Japanese art. She developed her own woodblock printing technique that used apple wood and ground her own ink from vegetables.
