Margaret Watkins moved to Glasgow - the city her parents had left to emigrate to Canada - in 1928. She never returned to North America, and more or less vanished. Not long before her death she gave her archive, wrapped in brown paper, to a neighbour who was interested in black and white photography and he had to promise not to open it until after she had died. The story of how, in the early 1970s, he discovered "one of the finest collections of artistic work achieved by the camera in the interwar era" is told here, Her last series of photographs was of Glasgow's building sites, and the Finnieston Crane (above, early 1930s) in particular.

Margaret Watkins rose to prominence in the 1920s and she was in great demand in NYC; this is her commissioned study, now in The Met, for a 1924 advertisement for Woodbury's Soap. It was her ability to portray domestic subjects in seductive ways that enabled her to become a successful commercial photographer, and she was one of the first to develop a photographic language for advertising. Art Canada Institute has an excellent account for those interested in knowing more about Margaret Atkins' life and work.

Margaret Watkins moved to New York City in 1915 to work with Alice Boughton (1866–1943) as an assistant in her portrait studio, a move which enabled many useful contacts and  introductions. Like many in her artistic circle, she was also influenced by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and his determination to have photography recognised as an art form on par with painting, sculpture, and traditional print-making. She lived a full and creative life in NYC, studying then teaching at the Clarence H White School (above). 

Margaret Atkins was "brought up on pictures and music" in a creative home in Hamilton, Ontario. But when her father went bankrupt she was taken out of school at the age of 15 to learn home-making skills, and also sold her hand-made "hand-wipers and pudding tidies". For the rest of her life would earn her own living, seeing photography as a craft skill as much as an art, but the domestic remained an important element in her work. In 1919 she began her influential series of still lifes; this is Domestic Symphony (1919, various collections).

This week on the Post we have the work of Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins (1884-1969), one of the first art photographers to work in advertising. Her life story is fascinating, from a cultivated and initially prosperous family life in Ontario, to success and recognition in New York City, to later obscurity in Glasgow. This is 'Untitled (Verna Skelton Posing for Cutex Advertisement), New York, 1924' which illustrates Margaret Watkins' technical and artistic skills. It blends aspects of Jacobean and Pre-Raphaelite portraiture, exquisite textiles, and the element of surprise that this is in fact an advert for nail-care products.

Now that lace doilies, tablecloths, veils, christening robes, and wedding dresses like this one in After The Wedding (mid-C20, Lakeland Museum) by Joseph Hardman, are all on the wane, there remains only a glimmer of optimism for the lace industry in the form of fashion, couture houses, and the occasional royal wedding (the lace in Catherine Middleton's wedding dress was discussed in great detail). For many people, though, the perception of the "chaste" Nottingham lace curtain as a symbol of bourgeois, dull, conventional life as articulated by EM Forster in his unfinished novel Nottingham Lace (1901) and in A Room with a View has altered tastes and thus demand for this once-important textile. 

Nottingham and Calais lace made on huge Leavers machines replaced the traditional hand-made lace from cottage industries in places such as Honiton and Brussels. This was made either with multiple threads on bobbins on a pillow as here in The Lace-Maker (Mrs Newell Making Lace) (c1920, The Higgins) by Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958) or using a needle and single thread method. Despite a short revival thanks to Queen Victoria's wedding dress, by 1870 almost every type of handmade lace could be copied by machine, leading to the almost total disappearance of the handmade lace industry in England by 1900. Today, organisations such as the Lace Guild are keeping the skills alive, but on a very small scale.