Sent to Edinburgh for her education, Margaret Stoddart studied under C.H. Elliot and the watercolourist Alfred Walsh at the Canterbury College School of Art on her return. She had an impressionistic style, and preferred working in watercolour in the outdoors in front of a chosen motif to preserve a fresh and spontaneous effect. From 1898 Stoddart travelled and worked in Italy, Norway (where her mother had been born), France and Britain. She met her contemporaries Dorothy Kate Richmond and Frances Hodgkins at the artists' colony of St. Ives in Cornwall in 1902, but though Hodgkins was friendly to her she described Stoddart's work as "hopelessly dowdy and uninteresting".

Devoted to painting landscapes, Stoddart was a doyenne of the Christchurch art scene. She also painted sensitive studies of flowers. Stoddart believed that traditional watercolour technique resulted in an ineffectual `transparency', and she developed a personal technique of adding and layering colour to achieve a solidity of form. Stylistically her works borrow from French Impressionism and from the Romantic Realism popular in New Zealand in the latter years of the nineteenth century.

- Lara Strongman, Curator of Fine Arts