ELIZABETH Mary Watt had a face of uncompromisingly boot-like masculinity, but by God she knew how to dress. She once went to a dance in ``a rapidly concocted dress held together by 22 safety pins'' - eat your heart out, Elizabeth Hurley.

Watt was one of the youngest Glasgow Girls, born on Valentine's Day, 1885, two decades after the movement's more celebrated linchpins Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh and Jessie Newbery.

She had the great good fortune, it could be argued, to lose her father to bankruptcy and the lure of America when she was 19, forcing her mother to move to Glasgow from the family's home in Dundee. She found work as a fabric designer and enrolled, at 21, in the Glasgow School of Art under Fra Newbery, where her fellow students included Jessie King, Ann MacBeth, De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar and Norah Neilson Gray.

Years of evening classes and fruitless attempts at teaching and living in Sheffield and London followed, but by 1919 she was back in the heart of the Glasgow art world, elected as a member of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists and looking for a studio to turn professional.

She soon moved on from her early family portraits and the stylised floral designs dictated by her work as a commercial colourist, and began exploring the West coast of Scotland. Her misty, brooding landscapes call to collectors today; but back then she found her shrewd little fairy folk, which she sent gambolling round moon-lit birch trees or up stalks of barley, were better sellers. Eventually, she became best known in the Glasgow art world as a painter of pottery, which she bought blank and decorated with brightly-coloured flowers, fruits, toadstools or dragonish designs.

And all the while, says admirer Colin Scott-Sutherland in a handsome, newly-published booklet which aims to re-establish Watt's reputation, she was having the time of her life.

Her mother dead and her penniless father, now returned from America, cared for by an older brother, she was free to earn her living and spend her money as she chose, a daring independence achieved by few single women in the first half of this century. She never married, but had male admirers, whom she described, with typical flair, as ``my dehydrated Beau Brummels''.

The daughter of sculptor Benno Schotz, one of Watts' circle, remembers her as ``a very bohemian person, always untidily dressed, in dirndl skirts which didn't suit her, and such shoes - 1920s style . . . she was the epitome of what I imagined painters had been in earlier years. I loved being invited up to her attic studio with its big cushions on the divan bed. Both in my own home and in Aunt Hesse's we had the same, but they didn't seem as voluptuous or as exciting as hers.''

She was loved for her almost schoolgirl humour (a Noggin the Nog galley, which sails through the pages of Iona Verses, one of the few books she illustrated, acquires patches on the mainsail as the journey progresses) and a reckless sense of fun.

She died in 1954 from leukaemia. During the war, she painted the radium numerals on aircraft instruments, and it is possibly an endearing trait of her odd, idiosyncratic personality which contributed to her early death, for she had a habit of licking the paintbrushes as she worked.

n Elizabeth Mary Watt, by Colin Scott-Sutherland (Patten People no 7, limited edition of 350 copies by Patten Press, Penzance).