A painting on show in Helensburgh library is to go on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of an exhibition that will celebrate the work of Scottish female artists.
Hôpital Auxiliaire d’Armée 301, by Norah Neilson Gray, is owned by Argyll and Bute Council after being donated by the artist’s sister in 1984.
However, from November 7 until next July the oil painting will be on loan to the Edinburgh gallery as part of its Modern Scottish Women exhibition.
The painting will feature alongside more than 90 pieces of work by female artists and sculptors spanning from 1885 until 1965.
In the Dictionary of Women Artists, the late Ailsa Tanner wrote that in 1918, on her own initiative, Gray went to work as a voluntary aid detachment nurse at a French Red Cross hospital, staffed entirely by members of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.
It was during the last German advance on Paris that she painted the casualty receiving area in the crypt of the abbey where the hospital was based. Tanner adds:
Norah Neilson Gray was an artist of real quality. She had something to say in painting, and it was in her own way, a resolute but feminine way.
She was acknowledged in her own day, especially in France, and was reaching he height of her career when she died of cancer at the age of 49. Since her death her work has been undeservedly neglected.
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