Scottish Art

The Story of Scottish Art episode 4: The climactic episode of the series explores how, over the last 100 years, Scottish art has wrestled as never before with questions of identity and exploded like a visual firecracker of different ideas and styles. During the last century, Scottish artists embroiled themselves with some of the most exciting and dynamic art movements ever seen – provoking, participating and creating stimulating works of art that have left an extraordinary legacy.     Lachlan Goudie discovers how artists such as William McCance attempted to bring about a Scottish renaissance in the visual arts, while […]

The Story of Scottish Art episode 3: Artist Lachlan Goudie explores how, at the turn of the 19th century, Scotland’s artists challenged the traditions they had inherited and, embracing new ways of seeing and painting from the Continent, revolutionised Scottish art.     From the Glasgow Boys’ intimate rural realism, to Arthur Melville’s brilliantly experimental watercolours; from Hill House, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘total work of art’, to JD Fergusson’s pioneering Scottish modernism, this generation transformed the way we saw Scotland’s landscape and identity.   The Story of Scottish Art episode 3   Arthur Melville Arthur Melville (1855–1904) was a Scottish

The Story of Scottish Art episode 2: The 18th century heralded the greatest blossoming of Scottish artistry in its history. The most powerful and influential figures in Britain clamoured to have their portraits painted by Allan Ramsey and Henry Raeburn and their houses designed by Robert Adam; they stood in awe at the epic Highland landscapes of Horatio McCulloch and wept at the sensitive genre paintings of David Wilkie. Scots artist Lachlan Goudie explores how the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment and the classical influence of the continent gave these artists the confidence and the inspiration to forge a whole

The Story of Scottish Art episode 1: In the first programme, Lachlan explores Scotland’s earliest art. He visits the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, where standing stones have watched the seasons pass for thousands of years. On the island of Westray he encounters an ancient figurine – the Westray Wife – the oldest sculpted human figure in the British Isles. He explores the sophisticated art of the Picts and the Gaels, the exuberant Renaissance period of the early Stewart kings, and the destructive heights of the Reformation, when religious artworks were all but wiped out in Scotland.     In