Sydney-born Margaret Cilento grew up in Brisbane where she studied art with Caroline Barker at Somerville House, attended Barker’s Brisbane Sketch Club and life-drawing classes, and received drawing lessons from FJ Martyn Roberts. In the 1940s, Cilento moved to Sydney, where she shared a flat with fellow Queensland artist Margaret Olley, and studied at the East Sydney Technical College. In 1946, Cilento was awarded the Queensland Wattle Day League travelling art scholarship, which enabled her to study in New York. There, she met avant-garde artists, including abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell and colour field painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The scholarship brought Cilento into contact with developments in contemporary art that she explored further after moving to Paris, where she studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and saw the work of Pablo Picasso and other modern European artists who were revitalising classical traditions.  

The influences Cilento absorbed can be observed in The immigrants, made shortly after her return to Brisbane in 1951, in which she blended elements of Picasso’s mythic Mediterranean landscapes with a quintessential image of Brisbane suburbia.