Margaret Mellis (b. 1914)was born in Wu-Kung-Fu, China, of Scottish parents. They moved to Britain when she was a baby. She was educated in Edinburgh and attended the college of Art there between 1929-33. Her teachers included Hubert Wellington and S J Peploe. A postgraduate award and scholarship enabled her to study and travel on the continent, where she was taught in Paris by Andre Lhote.

From 1935-7 she held a fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art. Then Margaret Mellis studied at Euston Road School and in 1939 she moved to St.Ives with her first husband, Adrian Stokes (she later married Francis Davison), where they became key figures in the artist’s colony. There she was influenced by Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and adopted a Constructivist style, making reliefs. She returned to painting after the war, when she lived for two years from 1948 in the south of France. On her return to England in 1950 she went to live in Suffolk, settling in Southwold, where found objects and driftwood were employed in her work.

Margaret Mellis exhibited widely in group shows and had many solo exhibitions, including at AIA Gallery, Bear Gallery in Oxford, Redfern Gallery and a retrospective at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 1997. The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, among other public galleries, hold examples of her work.