Margaret Foster Richardson, born in Winnetka, Illinois, received her art education in the east. After studying painting at the Massachusetts State Normal Art School in Boston from 1900 to 1905 with Joseph DeCamp and Ernest L. Major, she studied for two years with the painter Edmund C. Tarbell at the Boston Museum School. Her first recognition came with the Harris bronze medal and prize ($300) at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1911, followed by the Maynard portrait prize at the National Academy of Design two years later...[in 1913] she departed on her own study tour of the art galleries of Europe -- starting in Spain, continuing to Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France, and concluding in England.
(Tuft, Eleanor. American Women Artists, 1830-1930. exh. cat., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987)