Madge Tennent (née Madeline Grace Cook; June 22, 1889 – February 5, 1972) was a naturalized American artist, born in England, raised in South Africa, and trained in France.

A child prodigy, Tennent spent her formative teenage years in Paris, where she honed technical mastery under the tutelage of William-Adolphe Bouguereau at the Académie Julian; simultaneous exposure to the city's leading avant-garde artists, including Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pablo Picasso, stoked her pioneering vision.

Her reverent fascination with Hawaiian women inspired the sweeping aesthetic quest that would culminate in an iconic signature style: enormous paintings of voluptuous female figures that synthesized brilliant, swirling hues into graceful, harmonious compositions.

Her father was an architect, seascape painter, and fine craftsman in woodcarving, while her mother owned, edited, and wrote for a weekly magazine titled South African Women in Council.

Having settled in Cape Town by 1894, the Cooks took a lively interest in comparative creeds that embraced many religions, as well as in matters of psychic and astrological trend.

Attending one was Hugh Cowper Tennent, a chartered accountant from New Zealand who was stationed in Cape Town with the Natal Light Horse regiment.

Olympia of Hawaii, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, exemplifies Tennent's enchantment with color and use of the bright, warm hues endemic to Hawaiʻi.

Generously applying paint with a palette knife, she avoided sensuousness in the representation of skin texture, instead imbuing the trademark sense of strength and grandeur tinged with fragility apparent in Holoku Ball and Hawaiian Singer (early 1930s).

Hawaiian Bride (1935), one of the few paintings with which Mrs. Tennent was "almost satisfied,"[7] marked a turning point in the development of her distinctive style; there, as in the concurrent Girl in Red Dress (1935) and Two Lei Sellers (1936), she achieved an ethereal intensity with softer hues and blurred, iridescent forms.

In these later works, whirling wisps of complementary oils fuse the figures to their floral surroundings, visualizing the resilient bonds that Madge Tennent perceived between the body and spirit of Hawaiʻi.

In the summer of 1935, all six canvases traveled from Honolulu to Europe for a series of major one-woman exhibitions that established Mrs. Tennent's presence on the global art circuit.

Her lifted arms, her wistful smile, the ember-like glow of her sunny flesh, are a perpetual and queenly benediction from one in an honored profession in the Islands possessing the most beautiful people of the world.

Three Hawaiian Women, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates this stark contrast to the polychromatic blaze of her earlier works and evidences her lasting belief that “every true artist knows that his work must evolve or die […] therefore, the moment he has perfected some type of style of expression peculiar to himself he must move on or he becomes academic.” Working on a smaller scale in the 1950s, for example, Madge Tennent executed a series of portraits featuring Hawaiian aliʻi in oils, prints, and watercolors; she treated Hawaiian royalty as descendants from the gods, possessed of heroic proportions and serene facial features that conveyed “a gentleness that tends to make a predominance of convex lines, only seen in the great art of the world.” Until her death in 1972, Tennent would continuously diversify across media and scale, but never once did she stray from or grow tired of her beloved Hawaiian subjects.

A renowned art educator as well as painter of modern figurative canvases of Hawaiian subjects, Madge Tennent had a distinguished career based primarily in Hawaiʻi from where she sent paintings to the mainland United States for exhibitions in New York City and Chicago between 1930 and 1939.

She was among the first artists to embrace native Hawaiians as a primary subject matter, whom she depicted as large and robust with audacious, swirling forms and colors.

She has the equipment of an exceptionally gifted artist, and to prove it she includes one or two heads done with an academic, though masterly touch, which gives one no more than the physical features of her sitters.

Not so much massive as fantastically round, clad in voluminous draperies of almost painfully intense color, give one a sense of tropical exuberance not confined to paint […] her art could be described as an experiment in amplitude.

Those of us who salute John Kelly, for instance, as a most graphic delineator of Hawaiian types, cannot compare him to Tennent as an artist, anymore than an aficionado of either, links Gershwin to Wagner.