Margaret MacGregor Angus was a British painter, designer and teacher.
25 Facts About Peggy Angus
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Peggy Angus was born in Chile on 9 November 1904, in a railway station, the eleventh of thirteen children of a Scottish railway engineer.
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Peggy Angus wanted to be a painter but soon transferred to the Design School at the RCA, where she was taught by Paul Nash.
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Peggy Angus travelled to Russia in 1932 for an art teachers' study visit and later urged her students to travel to the Soviet Union.
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Between 1938 and 1947, Peggy Angus was married to James Maude Richards, a young architect and writer, with whom she had a daughter, Victoria, and a son Peggy Angus.
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Peggy Angus became editor of the Architectural Review and introduced her to many modernist architects.
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Peggy Angus was a charismatic and formidable character, opinionated and inclined to exhibitionism but generous-spirited, extremely sociable and a great inspiration to many young people.
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Peggy Angus eschewed a bourgeois lifestyle for places without modern conveniences, such as Furlongs on the Sussex Downs and her bothie she bought from the artist Charles Higgins in the Outer Hebrides.
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Peggy Angus travelled widely in Europe and across the Middle East to India and Pakistan, looking at patterns and popular culture.
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Peggy Angus spent a year in Indonesia on a scholarship studying folk art in Java and Bali.
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Peggy Angus went twice to the USSR, in 1932 as a delegate for the Art Masters Association, and again in the late 1960s with her friends Ursula Mommens and Pearl Binder and teachers of music, art and drama, arranged through the Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR.
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Peggy Angus became best known for her industrial designs, tiles and wallpapers.
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Peggy Angus designed a new form of marbling design for glass cladding for the original buildings at Gatwick Airport, which were produced by the firm TW Ide and given the trade name "Anguside".
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Peggy Angus was interested in mural painting and made several murals for private clients.
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Peggy Angus tested her designs on demonstration lengths of lining paper.
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Peggy Angus won the Sanderson Centenary wallpaper prize but their subsequent commercial version, which had the regularity of a machine-printed design, was far less restful to the eye than the subtle changes of pigment and pressure when done by her own methods.
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Peggy Angus always wanted her designs to be a sympathetic background on which to hang pictures.
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Peggy Angus continued to print her own designs with the help of a team of willing apprentices.
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Ishbel MacDonald was a lifelong friend and Peggy Angus occasionally stayed at Chequers with her and enjoyed the subversiveness of drawing cartoons for the Daily Worker while she was there.
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From 1933 onwards, Peggy Angus rented a shepherd's cottage, Furlongs, near Beddingham at the foot of the South Downs, and made that a home to which a circle of artists gathered.
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In 1946, Peggy Angus introduced Tirzah Garwood to her second husband, radio producer Henry Swanzy.
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Peggy Angus was a part-time teacher for much of her life and believed her teaching was as important as creating her own work.
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Peggy Angus fostered a community of artists and designers in South East England, having a durable influence on decorative arts and fashion, for instance through Janet Kennedy.
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Peggy Angus wanted to encourage a sense of patronage and visual literacy for all, including those not thinking of following an artistic career.
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Peggy Angus remained a teacher at the school until 1970.