Mary L. Gow

Mary Lightbody Gow (London, 1851 – London, 1929) was a British watercolourist who worked mainly on figures and genre scenes, with a particular focus on young girls. Her career belongs to the London art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is of interest because it shows the place women painters held in the exhibiting institutions of the period.

The daughter of the painter James Gow, who worked on genre and historical subjects, and the sister of the artist Andrew Carrick Gow, she studied at Heatherley's School. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Society of British Artists, where she sent eighteen works between 1869 and 1880, and from 1873 she also showed at the Royal Academy, the New Gallery in London and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In 1875 she was made a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. Her painting Marie-Antoinette was purchased under the Chantrey bequest in 1908.

In 1907 she married the genre painter Sydney Prior Hall. Her work was shown at the Palace of Fine Arts at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and her work Mother and Child was included in the book Women Painters of the World.