Mary Nicol Neill Armour

Who is Mary Nicol Neill Armour?

Mary Nicol Neill Armour LLD was a Scottish landscape and still life painter and former Honorary President of the Glasgow School of Art and of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.

Born Mary Nicol Steel on the 27 March 1902 at Blantyre, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, Mary Steel won a scholarship to attend Hamilton Academy. At the Academy she attracted the attention of art teacher Penelope Beaton who persuaded Mary’s father to allow his daughter to enrol at Glasgow School of Art, where she was to study from 1920. In 1925, after a post-diploma year and teacher training, Mary Steel became an art teacher.

In 1927 she married the landscape and figure painter William Armour, settling in Milngavie on the outskirts of Glasgow city.

Mary Armour was to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy; the Royal Scottish Academy; the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Scottish Society of Artists and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. In 1941 she was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Watercolour Society, becoming a full member in 1956, and became a Royal Scottish Academician in 1958.