Scottish painter. She was born in Galashiels, the daughter of a tweed designer (she later described how she used flecks of colour in a manner similar to tweed makers: ‘I do with a spot of red or yellow in a harmony of grey, what my father did in his tweed’).

In 1913 she studied at Edinburgh College of Art and in 1920 she married James Beattie Michie, an architect with the War Graves Commission in France, where they lived for the next fourteen years.