Item NMC/0195D - Children's stories

Miss Jean Douglas Burns, the first child of Captain Alan Burns and Helen Burns (nee Hope), was born on the 15th June, 1903, at Cumbernauld House near Glasgow.

She attended the Glasgow School of Art (taking Drawing & Painting, and Black & White Section (Lithographic and Printing Processes) courses between 1920 and 1929) securing a Diploma in Drawing and Painting in 1927, and subsequently focussed on woodcuts and engraving, exhibiting widely including on 5 occasions at the Royal Scottish Academy, as well as the Royal Scottish Institute of Fine Arts, the Society of Women Artists, the Society of Artist Printmakers, the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and the Glasgow Institute. She also exhibited with the lesser known and now defunct Society of Artist-Printers, and produced illustrations for Harriet C. Hog’s "Supposing that lots of things were true. A book of rhymes", 1929.

Her mother died in 1923 when Jean’s younger brothers were quite young and she had to reduce her art activity and take up the role of mother, and lady of the house for her father. During the Second World War she managed Cumbernauld farm. In 1947 she moved to Cowdenknowes farm near Earlston, Berwickshire, where she ran a riding school with her youngest brother Charles, living in one of the cottages at Sorrowlessfield. She continued to farm for the rest of her life until retirement, and became a Joint Master of the nearby Lauderdale Hunt. After 1960 she lived at Cowdenknowes House.

Jean Burns died on the 30th September, 1992, aged 89, in the Borders Hospital, Melrose.