Genre painter, eventually married as Madeleine Arkell, who entered the Slade School of Fine Art for the 1927–8 year, gaining her fine art diploma in 1930. She re-entered in 1934–5 and 1936–7, leaving in 1938. Pearson was a member of the WIAC who exhibited in Glasgow, Bristol and the Malay States; was included in an Arts Council Travelling Exhibition, 1949; and showed at the Leicester Galleries in 1950. In that year she shared an exhibition at the AIA with Margaret Boyd and Alice Lambe. Pearson lived in Highgate, north London, where her house was “a kind of salon” for artists and critics including Kyffin Williams, Lawrence Alloway, Stella Steyn, Frederick Gore and John Cecil Stephenson, according to Simon Guthrie in his 1997 biography The Life and Art of John Cecil Stephenson.