Margaret Whitaker was an art teacher, who often enjoyed drawing and sketching at the fairground.

Margaret enjoyed visiting the fairground and in particular was fascinated with the traditional British galloper. Her early sketches during the last years of the Second World War reflect Margaret’s wistful determination to overcome the hardship of the war and her transition from student to teacher as she stepped into her professional career teaching art upon graduation from art school.

Margaret used the fairground for inspiration in the 1940s and again in the 1970s. In the 1940s she produced a series of live sketches and drawings at Mitcham Fair while finishing her art studies and Nottingham Goose Fair in the early years of her professional career as an educator. Her loosely drawn sketches suggest that Margaret may have used them as a teaching tool in her classroom and to inspire her pupils to experiment with the subject. The drawings from this period, reflect Margaret’s appreciation of Lautrec’s and Renoir’s approaches to depicting similar scenes, and burst with her delighted access to television documentaries, books and Renoir exhibitions held in Paris and London. The work Margaret produced in the 1970s, in contrast, reflect a very different approach to the subject, where Margaret used photography as the media to capture snapshots of the fairground that most intrigued her, which she then used to produce a series of 3D Christmas cards for friends and family that year.

Margaret returned to a topic she loved thirty years after she first used the fairground as inspiration for her artistic expression, still finding delight in a topic that has inspired so many generations of artists over its extensive history.