Born near Wolverhampton, she settled in Glasgow in the late 1880s. Margaret and her sister Frances enrolled at Glasgow School of Art, where they met Charles Rennie Mackintosh and James Herbert MacNair. By the mid-1890s the sisters had established a studio and soon began to collaborate with Mackintosh and MacNair. The four artists quickly cemented their international reputations. Frances Macdonald and MacNair married in 1899, and Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald married in 1900. However, owing to Mackintosh’s deteriorating health, Margaret spent her time looking after him and so made few works after 1914.