Margaret Moffett Law was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina to parents of prominent and wealthy Southern lineage. She graduated from Converse College in 1895 and then went on to advanced study at some of the nation's most respected art institutions. For her era, Law manifested an unusual degree of dedication and independence in pursuing her career.

Upon her graduation from Converse, Law continued her training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cooper Art School, Art Students League, and New York School of Art, studying with leading teachers, including William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Robert Henri. She also studied in Provincetown, Massachusetts with Charles Hawthorne; in Paris, with André Lhote, a progressive artist associated with cubism; with Lamar Dodd at the University of Georgia; and in Mexico City. Of the artists with whom she studied, Henri's impact was strongest, inspiring her to paint subjects from the world she knew. Henri preached to his students: "I am not interested in any one school or movement, nor do I care for art as art. I am interested in life . . . let your history be of your own time, of what you can get to know personally . . . within your own experience."1 Law adopted this recommendation wholeheartedly, later crediting him as the most powerful influence on her art.2

After the conclusion of World War I, Law worked as an art teacher at Bryn Mawr College in Baltimore. She also continued to develop her own artistic style-a style that increasingly favored a modernist approach, more freely conceived and suggestive than her earlier efforts. Her work of the 1930s and 1940s, employing a vivid palette of color and bold simplified forms and design, reflects her energetic assimilation of modernist principles.

In 1936, Margaret Law returned to Spartanburg, where she served as Superintendent of Art in the public school system and was instrumental in the founding of the Spartanburg County Museum of Art and the establishment of its permanent collection. Active in regional arts organizations, she enthusiastically exhibited her work, including at the Southern States Art League. She also mounted solo shows at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art).

Law is best known for her unsentimental depictions of African-American subjects in rural and routine settings, usually executed in colorfully stylized watercolors and prints. Though she studied with important and influential artists, Law developed her own individual style and became a chronicler of black experience in the South, attesting to her independent spirit and approach to life.

Valerie Ann Leeds

1. Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit (1923), reprint: New York: Dover Books, 1984, 218.
2. Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Journal and Carolina Spartan (2 March 1937) as quoted in Zan Schuweiler Daab, Margaret Law: Painter of Southern Life (Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Spartanburg County Museum of Art, 1999), n.p.
3. "Fine Exhibits Are Being Shown at Museum," The Montgomery Advertiser (April 1947). Gibbes Museum of Art archives.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston