She soon began moving in a circle with numerous other women artists, including Elizabeth Boott, Cecilia Beaux, and Mary Franklin, often summering with them along the East Coast. In 1881, she toured France and Belgium with Ellen Day Hale, a distant cousin, and with Helen Mary Knowlton. In April 1886 she married the sculptor Henry Kirke Bush-Brown and moved to his home in Newburgh, New York. The couple later relocated to Washington, D.C.,[3] where Margaret worked as a portraitist and miniaturist. Her husband died in 1935, but she remained in Washington until 1941.[4] In that year she moved to Pennsylvania,[2] where she died three years later at the home of her son James in Ambler.[4] The Bush-Browns had three surviving children, two sons, Harold and James,[5] who became architects and a daughter, Lydia, who achieved some renown as an artist herself.[4]
In addition to exhibiting on her own, Margaret Bush-Brown would sometimes show work jointly with her husband and, later, with their daughter.[3] In 1883 she exhibited at the Paris Salon. Bush-Brown exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and painted an mural Spring for the Pennsylvania State Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.[6] She won a number of prizes for her work during her career,[1] and she was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1911.[2]