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Mary Nicol Neill Armour Biography
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She won a scholarship to Hamilton Academy where the art teacher, Penelope Beaton (1886–1963), noticed her; Beaton persuaded Armour's father to allow her to enrol at Glasgow School of Art in 1920. Armour's principal tutor was Maurice Greiffenhagen, assisted by David Forrester Wilson. In 1925, after a post-diploma year and teacher training, Mary Steel became an art teacher, working in schools in Glasgow and Cambuslang. In 1927 she married the landscape and figure painter William Armour (1903–1979) and settled in Milngavie just outside Glasgow.
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Armour gradually made a name for herself in the 1930s, exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy (where she won the Guthrie prize in 1937), the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGIFA). In 1941 she was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy and ten years later became a lecturer in still-life painting at Glasgow School of Art.
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In 1953 the Armours moved to Kilbarchan, a Renfrewshire weaving village. Mary Armour retired in 1962 and returned to full-time painting but now she found her work in considerable demand. Awards and honours came her way—full membership of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1958, the Cargill prize at the RGIFA in 1972, full membership of the latter in 1977, an honorary LLD from Glasgow University in 1982, and later she was elected honorary president of both the Glasgow School of Art and the RGIFA.
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