Last December, as Fiona Frank watched her 100-year-old aunt, Hannah, draw her last breaths in a nursing home, the University of Glasgow sent a special letter to her home. It offered an honorary degree to her aunt, an accomplished artist from the city and last survivor of the Art Nouveau movement. It should have been a proud moment for both of them, the culmination of a five-year campaign by Ms Frank to win greater recognition for her aunt’s often under-rated work, but the letter went to her house in Lancaster and she did not open it until after her aunt had died.

“If only they had sent it to the nursing home \, it would have been the last letter she received,” Ms Frank, 54, said.

However, the university offered to fulfil its promise and in a ceremony next month award Hannah Frank her honorary degree posthumously, a first for the university, while Glasgow has made its own approach, and on Friday Ms Frank will accept a posthumous award from the Lord Provost.

“She was only interested in being known as a Glasgow artist,” Ms Frank says. “Some people are trying to make her a Jewish artist, or a woman artist, but she wanted to be known as a product of her home city. She was very attached to Glasgow: in her diaries she talks about how walked, bussed and cycled the length and breadth of it.”

Hannah Frank was born to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants in the Gorbals in 1908. She studied for an arts degree at the University of Glasgow when she first undertook night classes at Glasgow School of Art. Despite her career as a teacher, she continued to be a prolific artist whose trademark line illustrations and prints were exhibited widely in the Thirties and Forties.

The following decade she turned to sculpture, the sole medium in which she worked for the next 40 years. She was known as an “artist’s artist” and her work was selected for exhibitions at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy but it fell out of fashion after the Sixties. In 1983, a retrospective of her work inspired a brief resurgence in interest but it was not until her niece began to promote her work in 2004 that she enjoyed acclaim once more.

Ms Frank commenced her project after she was left some money, which enabled her to leave her job and pursue a PhD. Shortly after she travelled to Glasgow to visit family, in particular her aunt. While she and a friend were at the nursing home, she spoke about how wonderful it would be to make her aunt, then in her nineties, a household name during her lifetime. “My friend remembers me saying all this pie in the sky stuff about what you would do to achieve this,” she said, “including exhibitions in Britain and abroad, Woman’s Hour and getting coverage in the colour supplements. It was pie in the sky stuff but as it turns out every single one of these things has happened and more.”

Ms Frank estimates she wrote to about 100 galleries before 12 of them, spread across the US, the UK and Israel, agreed to hold exhibitions over the next five years. The collection’s final destination was her aunt’s alma mater, the University of Glasgow, where a retrospective of her work opened on August 23 last year, the date of her 100th birthday.

“I knew she wasn’t interested in [her work going to] America or Doncaster or London — that was my little project — but I think I needed to do it to get back to Glasgow,” Ms Frank said. “Her eyes lit up when I told her that her work was going to be exhibited in Glasgow University.”

Often she feared her aunt, who was growing frailer by the day, would not live until her centenary. “I kept hoping that she would make it because I thought she never would,” she said. “I kept ringing the home, asking how she was. It suddenly struck me a couple of months ago that my energy probably kept her alive.

“I loved visiting her and I loved the energy and adrenalin of doing this. I came up every two to three weeks, spent a couple of hours with my aunt and a couple of hours running about.”

The loving bond that developed between the pair was another reward. “I got so much back from it, and so much appreciation from her. Sometimes I didn’t spend enough time with her as a niece, because I was always doing exhibitions, but even though she had lost her short term memory, but she always knew what I was doing for her. She used to say during interviews that if you can’t have children you should have a niece.”

Ms Frank is now focusing her efforts on ensuring her aunt’s legacy by helping to co-ordinate a joint project between the Scottish Jewish Archive Centre and the Glasgow School of Art to create an archive from her aunt’s extensive letters and diaries. She is also hoping to place some of her work, which was divided between Ms Frank and her two cousins after their aunt’s death, in the country’s public collections. Ms Frank says that Glasgow City Council’s museums have expressed an interest, as has the Scottish Parliament, following a reception held for her aunt at Holyrood in September of last year.

“I am not knocking on the door of the Tate, but I do want her work to be seen in Scotland,” she says. “She said she wanted to leave her footsteps on the sands of time, like the Longfellow poem, and I think we are going to be helping her to do that.

“My boyfriend says there are two people: Hannah Frank and Auntie Hannah.

“Hannah Frank the artist is not mine any more. If I get her work into public collections she can be a national artist and I can remember her as a funny, unsentimental matter-of-fact woman who loved her poems, and her books — and me.”

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