Margaret French was the daughter of Daniel Chester French and therefore grew up in the highly charged artistic atmosphere of her family home in Massachusetts, Chesterwood. Her early education was at the Clarke School and the Brearley School in New York; only in her early twenties did she seriously considered a career in sculpture. Her first teacher in this pursuit was, naturally, her father. She then studied with Abastenia St. Leger Eberle in New York, and with George Demetrios in Boston and Gloucester.
In 1921 she married William Penn Cresson, a writer and diplomat with the United States Department of State. She established a studio in Washington, D. C., where the Cressons made their home, but always spent the summers at Chesterwood. After her father's death in 1931, she gave much attention to the perpetuation of his memory and to the preservation of his home and studio. After her husband's death the following year, Margaret Cresson began to spend more time at Chesterwood; eventually she presented the estate to the government as a public museum. Her biography of her father, Journey into Fame was published in 1947.
Cresson specialized in the sculpting of portrait busts and reliefs. Among these are busts of sculptor Ivan Mestrovic and his wife Olga, one of Admiral Byrd (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.); she executed the bust of her father for the New York University Hall of Fame. Among her reliefs are memorial tablets executed for the Massachusetts State Normal School; the Y.W.C.A., Washington, D. C.; and St. Paul's Church, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She collaborated with her father on the Mallinckrodt Memorial Tablet at the Chemical Laboratory, Harvard.
Cresson was secretary of the National Sculpture Society in 1940-41, and was a member of the Architectural League of New York and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
She exhibited often at the Academy from the early 1920s into the 1950s. She won the Academy's Julia A. Shaw Memorial Prize in 1927.
