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Painted a year or so before her Still Life with Mackerel, held in the collection of Glasgow Museums at Kelvingrove, Still Life with Fruit has the same strength of colour and freedom of application. Jamieson using the difficult water-based medium of gouache makes no attempt to disguise the marks of the brush nor to create conventional perspective. Her composition is low-lit, the colour jewel-like. A candle stub in its holder is perhaps recently extinguished, its glow still somehow present in the stygian corner of the studio. For comparison we have the late still lifes of Anne Redpath, but it is the originality of the colour composition, which is striking, marking Jamieson out as a unique talent: the Glasgow Girl who graduated into a modernist.
Jamieson’s distinctive paintings and drawings reflect a love of nature and close observation, finding inspiration in the things she saw around her, painting still lifes, landscapes and natural objects such as shells, wood and stones using mixed media.
Florence Jamieson is considered one of the Glasgow Girls. Born in Glasgow in 1925 to a medical family with farming roots, she was evacuated to Morar in Lochaber during WWII where she attended high school for a few years before becoming head girl of St Trinnean’s in Galashiels. She began attending evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. She met and married the artist Robert Sinclair Thomson, ARSA (1915–1983) and they set up a commercial pottery studio in their Glasgow home; the first of its kind in Scotland and now referred to as the Clouston Street Pottery. In the 1950s Florence built a successful exhibiting career, with solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery in 1958 and 1961. Working in Glasgow, she was a friend and contemporary to Joan Eardley and Margot Sandeman. In 2014, she was one of four remaining living artists represented in the Glasgow Girls Kirkcudbright exhibition. Her work is represented in various public collections including Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, the Hunterian Art Gallery, The Scottish Arts Council Collection, Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries, and the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther.
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