Mary Harrison

Mary Harrison (1788 – 25 November 1875) was an English flower and fruit painter, and illustrator. She became popularly called the "Rose and Primrose painter". She has also been known as Mary P. Harrison and Mary Rossiter Harrison.

Life and work She was born Mary P. Rossiter, in Liverpool, the daughter of William Rossiter, a prosperous hat manufacturer of Stockport and Liverpool. She was a talented amateur artist from an early age though, from all accounts, she received little encouragement from her parents, even having to improvise paint-brushes from locks of her own hair, and make up pigments from household products; She practiced her art by copying from art prints. She also had to look after her invalid mother and sister, which left little time for painting.

In 1814 she married William Harrison and visited France on honeymoon. While in Paris she was given permission to copy pictures in the Louvre - the first English woman to have been granted this privilege. Her eldest son was born at Amiens, a few months before the Battle of Waterloo and she had to return home in haste in 1815.

Settling again in Liverpool her husband, who had up to then been comfortably off, became a partner in a brewery, in which he lost much of his fortune in 1830. Probably her best known work is "The History of a Primrose" (1862) executed in three panels representing 'Infancy, maturity, Decay'. She also provided some illustrations for Curtis's Botanical Magazine.

Mary worked up to the final day of her life, dying in Hampstead, London on 25 Nov. 1875, aged 88.

Of her children, George Henry Harrison (1816–1846) was a professional landscape painter; the eldest son, William Frederick Harrison (1815–1880) was a good amateur painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy and other galleries. Two of her daughters, Maria (fl. 1845-93) and Harriet also became painters.