Margaret Kaye, in a professional career in glass and textiles between 1937 and 1985, executed commissions for windows in Chichester, in York, for the Boltons and Radnage, as well as for a mission in Formosa (now Taiwan). She also carried out stained-glass restorations for the National Trust during the 1930s; at Stourhead, in Wiltshire, on the late 14th-century window of the great hall at Rufford Old Hall, and at Penshurst, Aylesbury and Woburn, among other houses.
In the field of textiles, she established a highly personal and individual style in the making of hangings for domestic interiors. These were splendid in their rich colour and texture, combining appliqué, fabric collage, strands of thread, dyed lace and embroidery, in bold and inventive designs evoking the palette of artists like Georges Rouault or Antonio Clavé, who were among her favourites. The Victoria and Albert Museum have four such pieces in their collection, Lion in a Forest and Bull and Pigeons, both of 1949, and The Cat and the Owl and Pigeons, both of 1951.
For a number of churches and cathedrals, she created altar frontals and copes. She executed ecclesiastical furnishings for Marlborough College Chapel, and for Winchester, York and Chichester Cathedrals, as well as for many English churches and chapels. One of her major commissions was that for the Queen’s personal gift to the cathedral in Accra, Ghana.
Margaret Kaye was born in 1912, and was first trained at Croydon School of Art, then attended the Royal College, specialising in fabric collage and stained glass, which she was taught by the celebrated Martin Travers. Later married to Reece Pemberton, the stage designer, and always herself passionate about the theatre, she designed accessories for ballets for Marie Rambert at Sadler’s Wells.
A new development during the 1940s was her activity as a painter. In many ways, her approach to fine art was related to her textiles. For her collage pictures, which were highly abstracted but suggested landscape, she used found objects, pieces of cork, leaf and bark, bits of fabric, cardboard and torn photographs, modifying them with watercolour or gouache, always with a rich and warm colour sense, characteristically in browns, ochres, creams and reds. Her work attracted the attention of Sir Kenneth (later Lord) Clark, who introduced her to the art dealer Henry Roland, and from 1949 to 1977 she had regular solo exhibitions at Roland, Browse and Delbanco in Cork Street.
Having acquired a weekend house on the edge of Tilford Common in Surrey in 1955, she and her husband moved there from Hammersmith shortly before he died in 1977. From 1976 to 1989 Kaye had four exhibitions at the New Ashgate Gallery in Farnham. Her collages were exhibited widely in mixed shows in Britain, the US, Australia and South Africa. Her work is in many public collections including those of the Contemporary Art Society and Manchester City Art Gallery.
Kaye taught full-time for a period at Birmingham College of Art, then, in London during the 1960s and 1970s, part-time at Camberwell and St Martin’s. Her former pupils remember her as “a wonderful teacher, always on the side of the students”. Having no children of her own, she valued her association with young talented people. In her later years she gave a Travelling Prize annually in Fine Art or Textiles to students at West Surrey College of Art.