IT was just an old painting left to gather dust in a spare room. In it, a beautiful young girl in a pink dress stares out from the canvas off into the distance, her expression pitched somewhere close to melancholy.

This unidentified piece isn’t any old portrait however, but a work by Jessie Alexandra Dick, one of the painting world’s famed Glasgow Girls. And now Dick’s nephew has asked for our readers’ to help solve the mystery and discover the identity of the painting’s subject.

A lifelong teacher at Glasgow School of Art, Dick, who was better known as J Alix Dick, joined the esteemed ranks of Margaret and Frances MacDonald as one of the Glasgow Girls.

Alix, as her nephew calls her, was born in 1896 and became a student at the Glasgow School of Art before becoming a staff member there, teaching drawing and later painting from 1922 to 1960. She painted and exhibited portraits and still life pieces and was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in 1960.

According to late author Jude Burkhauser, who curated a collection of the Glasgow Girls’ work, Dick was considered a later member of this group when she was active between the wars.

The Glasgow Girls were a group of women artists who gathered around Glasgow School of Art in the late 19th and early 20th Century and included the likes of Margaret and Frances MacDonald – wife and sister-in-law of Charles Rennie Mackintosh – Jessie M King, Bessie MacNicol and Norah Neilson Gray among others.

When Alix died in an accident at home her nephew, Ian Wilson-Dick, 89, inherited a number of his aunt’s paintings. Among the works were a self-portrait of Alix which he donated to the art school and which can be seen in the school’s digital archives. Another painting is the unidentified young woman in a pink smock that Wilson-Dick is keen to discover the identity of.

Wilson-Dick, who hopes to sell the unidentified work, said: “Now, being rather ancient myself, I am tidying up my affairs and must find some else to care for it, but before I do I would like to know if it would be possible, before it is too late, to find who this young lady was?”

One clue, he says, comes from an exhibition list he obtained from the RSA which includes a reference to an exhibited painting from Alix in 1961 called Girl In Pink. He said: “Girl In Pink would describe it rather nicely. There is no identification on the back, no indication that it was put on exhibit. I suspect, from the smock she is wearing, she may have been a student. If she was 20 in 1960 she would be 77 now, a young lady from my standpoint.We can hope that she is still enjoying life and it would be nice to add her name to a very delightful portrait.”

He believes the woman may be pictured alongside his aunt in one of the few pictures he has of her.

Spending most of his working life in America as an aeronautical engineer, Wilson-Dick met his painter aunt on two occasions in later life, though reports that he had a good relationship with her and her sister, his aunt Anna, when he visited them at their home in Clarkston.

Alix lived there with Anna, who at one point had been the Matron of Falkirk as well as their elder sister Meg, who they cared for before she died. He said: “I wish I had known her earlier, but living 40 years in America, it didn’t give me much opportunity. I came over with my two children – two boys – and she took a delight in them, they were quite young at the time. And another occasion I went over by myself. Everyone knew the two maiden ladies who lived in the house in Clarkston for many years. I was over six feet in those days, and when we were going outside she took my hand and shoved her arm into my arm and said ‘come on we’ll give the neighbours something to talk about’. She was a happy person and great fun to be with.”

The youngest girl of 11 children, Alix was the sister to Wilson-Dick’s father, Hugh, who was the youngest boy in the family. Their father was the head gardener on Lord Kelvin’s estate in Largs. Unfortunately in 1976 both Alix and Anna died in tragic circumstances in their Clarkston home after they had retired.

Keeping her art supplies in the loft in her house, Alix, then 80 years old, fell from the ladder and couldn’t move, remaining where she fell. Anne at that point was also bedridden, so neither of them could get to the telephone. They weren’t discovered by a neighbour until two days later. Wilson-Dick said: “Anna went first and then Alix shortly after. It was tragic, but, well, what can you say.”

With his elderly father not wanting to handle the affairs of his two sisters, Wilson-Dick became the executor of Alix’s estate from his home in California, though a number of her paintings were sent to his father in London, which he later acquired when he moved back to the UK at the start of 2000.

The remaining two paintings which he intends to sell, aside from the Girl in Pink, are called “A group of trees” – a pencil drawing possibly from a 1952 exhibit – and “Cioch na h-Oighe, Arran” – an oil exhibited in 1970 – “which I think is a plein air painting because the sisters kept a house on Arran for use in the summer.”

Wilson-Dick, who lives in Tunbridge Wells with his wife Jane, said he was christened as John after his maternal grandfather, but was known by Ian as the preferred name from his Scottish aunts.