When she was only in her early twenties. Mary Gow was included in Ellen Claytons survey English Female Artists. She had trained at Heatherley's art school- Study there included working from the model, but the main thrust was towards history painting and illustration, and there was a large collection of costumes and props. Gow's training is likely to have been encouraged by her family. Her father and brother were genre and history painters.
In 1869 Gow made her exhibiting debut at the Royal Society of British Artists, becoming a member in 1875. She also showed at the Royal Academy, the Walker Art Gallery. Liverpool, the Grosvenor Gallery and two watercolor societies. Her oil paintings were in tune with aesthetic tastes of the 1880s. In Fairy Tales (1880), a girl sits with a Walter Crane picture book open at the story of The Frog Prince, while in The Story of the Willow Pattern {1886} a mother shows blue and white china to her child. Gow also worked as an illustrator. Developments in printing technology and a parallel growth in literacy meant that there were an unprecedented number of illustrated publications. Gow's work appeared in the Quiver, Cassell's Family Magazine and the Graphic. A commission from the latter in 1895 resulted in Your Majesty, a painting of the young Queen Victoria being informed of her accession. Sydney Prior Hall, a fellow contributor to the Graphic, and favourite artist of the Royal family, became Gow's husband.
The models Gow used for Marie Antoinette (1908), her watercolour in the Tate Collection, appear in her work over several years. The Studio carried a reproduction of the watercolour The Balloon of 1910, which had been purchased by the Walker Art Gallery. Liverpool. It shows the same woman and children in late eighteenth-century costume as the Tate work. Romantic Victorian and Edwardian versions of history focused on tales of tragic queens (Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey were popular subjects). |
