Margaret Helen Barnard was born in Bengal, India in 1898, her father serving in the Police. She returned to the UK to go to school at Bath High School and St. Leonard’s in Scotland, subsequently enrolling at the Glasgow School of Art 1917-1923, exhibiting in Glasgow in 1922.

She married her fellow student Robert Mackechnie, RBA (1894-1975) in 1924 having moved to Italy where they lived for a short period of time. Returning to London, Barnard studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art under the principal Claude Flight along with her contemporary Sybil Andrews (1898-1992), this was to prove formative and influential on her career as a designer and printmaker. Meanwhile in 1927 her husband had joined the influential Seven and Five Society numbering Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), Henry Moore (1898-1986), Claude Flight (1881-1955), Sir Cedric Morris (1889-1982) and Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) among its members.

A painter of landscapes, in Scotland and Italy, and a talented draughtswoman, it was as a printmaker that Barnard was at the forefront of Modern British art and design in the latter 1920s and throughout the 1930s, in 1938 and 1939 designing posters for London Transport. 1938 saw her exhibit at the Royal Academy and during the war she ceased work as an artist. From 1948 her and her husband returned annually to Italy, renting a house in Positano.

Margaret Barnard, with her husband, had lived in Rye from 1934 and in 1990 donated a large body of her work, and that of her husband Robert Mackechnie to the Rye Art Gallery.