The Scottish Women's Hospital : In The Cloister of the Abbaye at Royaumont. Dr. Frances Ivens inspecting a French patient.

During the First World War Norah Neilson-Gray served as a volunteer nursing orderly with Dr Elsie Inglis’s Scottish Women’s Hospitals. She was based at Royaumont Abbey, one of ten hospitals run by the organisation in the War years. She painted in the daytime after completing night shifts. Norah Neilson-Gray painted the hospital in Hôpital Auxiliaire 1918 which she offered to the Imperial War Museum. The Museum’s Women’s Work Sub-committee instead pressed her to produce this new work, with its greater emphasis on the female doctor, Dr Frances Ivens. This reflects the aim of the Sub-committee to promote the war time contribution of women. After the war, the artist returned to Glasgow and resumed her career as a portrait painter. A year later the artist became the first woman to be appointed to the Hanging Committee of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. She went on to teach design and drawing at Glasgow School of Art, where she herself had studied.