Pink Roses (New Dawn Roses)
Dr Mary Armour
1980 oil on canvas

Mary Armour is best known as a still-life painter in oil and watercolour. The examples of her work we hold in the College are some of her beautiful and much-loved flower paintings. Mary Armour was born in Blantyre, Lanarkshire, in 1902. Her art teacher at Hamilton Academy noticed her talent and persuaded her father to allow her to enrol at Glasgow School of Art in 1920. Although she deserved the final year prize she did not receive it after ignoring the tutor’s instructions to create a final piece using traditional iconography. Armour instead chose a modern subject, women gathering at the pithead, highlighting that she did not shy away from clashes of artistic taste. After graduating she became an art teacher and married the landscape and figure painter William Armour. After her marriage she was no longer allowed to teach so took up painting full time.

Armour became better known in the 1930s, exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. She later became a lecturer in still-life painting at Glasgow School of Art. As her career developed Armour began to use brighter colours and looser brushwork while still maintaining the traditional, painterly qualities of Scottish art. By the 1950s Armour was immensely successful, winning a variety of awards and gaining full membership to the RSA, RGIFA and an honorary LLD from Glasgow University. Her success did not change her straightforward manner, her ability to speak plainly and her sense of humour. Unfortunately, in the last ten years of her life she had to give up painting due to failing eyesight and poor health.
Armour’s delicate landscapes and still-lifes represent her belief that traditional artistic values can have modern relevance and display the Grand Style of the Glasgow School of Art in the 1920s.