Use this page to understand how we identify paintings. See our Index of paintings.

Margit kept detailed records of her paintings in a stenographer-style spiral notebook. Usually each painting had its own entry. (One exception was Fountain Church paintings, which were often sold as a group.) Arranged by year, her typical handwritten entry consisted of the following fields—even though they weren’t labeled as such:

• Number — The order in which the painting was [produced/sold?] in that year.
• Name — A brief description of the painting, such as “summer stream with birches”. No, she wasn’t always consistent or clear about her “names”. After all, they were just for her reference.
• Size — The painting’s dimensions, such as 16×20. Sometimes she drew an upright box next to the number to indicate it was in portrait orientation.
• Recipient — The person who bought or was gifted the painting, which sometimes consisted of first names or descriptions like “Lady in Orfordville” or “Vet. Plum Wis.”
• Price — How much she charged (sometimes “gift”).
• Other — She would write “here” for a painting kept at their house or “framed” if she provided it already with a frame.

How our recordkeeping differs

For this website we keep our records a bit differently than Margit. For one, her records don’t contain the field names shown above. Here are some other points:

• Unique identifier — We use an ID that combines the year and number. In this way, each painting’s reference number starts with the two-digit year of its creation. So the first painting recorded in 1961 is “61-01”.
• IDs for the unrecorded — Margit did NOT record all her paintings. For those paintings, we’ve made some guesses. If their style is consistent with early work, we have assigned them “5x” (and they appear after “59”). Unrecorded paintings of a more accomplished style are given “6x” and appear at the end of the 1960s in our listing. This system seems to work because her maturation as an artist is evident as she moved from the 1950s to the 1960s.
• “Names” — We have put Margit’s name/description in quotes to show it as accurately as possible (including capitalizing as she had done it). For unrecorded paintings (for which we don’t have her “name”), we put a description in brackets [like this].
• Recipient — The name of the recipient (or “initial owner”) has been standardized.

Margit’s productivity by year

Margit’s produced the bulk of her paintings in the 1960s. Then 1970 happened. Of that year’s low number (just two) she wrote the following in her record book: “Made the two above first part of Jan. Spent 3 wks in the hospital. Recuperated the rest of the year.” Then she bounced back in the early 1970s to have some of her most productive years.

Note: Margit did not separate paintings created in 1953 and 1953. We have labeled them all as “52”.

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