A Portrait of Scotland

If you can draw, you can draw.

Or so you think.

But if you don't keep at it,

you'll find, as I did, that it slips away.

So one day, you wake up, and you start doing it again,

whenever and wherever you can.

And more often than not,

it will be the human face that you're drawn to.

This is where my talent brought me,

Glasgow School of Art.

I first came here as a student in 1976.

I was a noisy but secretly nervous youth.

And when I walked through these doors,

I joined a sea of denim, long hair and afghan coats.

What gift I had was for drawing faces,

so I'd certainly come to the right place

if I wanted to learn about that most particular of Scottish arts,

the portrait.

But then you see, punk rock happened

and a whole bunch of us abandoned our army surplus greatcoats

in favour of peroxide hair, PVC trousers and guitars.

I turned my back on the place,

but now, with this programme, I've been offered a second chance,

a chance to learn anew about the great traditions and history of Scottish painting.

And this time, I'm going to take it.

Here at the Glasgow School of Art,

the final year degree show is coming down

and a new group of artists is setting out to take their part in the story of Scottish art.

It is a story that has been dominated by the portrait.

I'm going to be looking back over 500 years to consider why.

I'll be looking at the artists

who have been capturing Scotland and its people on canvas.

From 17th century portrait painters

to 19th century neo-classicists,

to Glasgow boys, old and new.

Scotland's artists have created an enduring and unique portrait of Scotland.

This story of Scotland's art begins here -

an unassuming church in Perth

that witnessed the advent of a revolution.

What happened here would change Scottish art forever.

It was on this spot on 11th May 1559,

that John Knox preached an impassioned sermon that outlawed

what was until then, the mainstay of Scottish art, religious icons.

On that day, Knox unequivocally brought to Scotland

a brand of Protestantism that would change everything.

"Though shalt not make unto thee any graven image

"or any likeness of anything

"that is in heaven above,

"or that is in the earth below,

"or that is in the water under the earth."

It was year zero.

The crowd grew so frenzied, they smashed the stained glass

and ripped down the paintings and statues.

The Reformation of the Catholic Church was gathering pace.

Across Europe, it would devastate swathes of cultural heritage.

In a way, the death of religious art

was the making of the portrait.

Holy pictures were now forbidden, so with no market,

and a living to earn, artists had to take a different tack.

Protestants believed in the importance of the individual.

And through reading the Bible,

having a direct relationship with God.

You were responsible for your actions,

not the Catholic hierarchy in Rome.

The perfect art form to illustrate the new way of thinking

was portraiture.

Scotland's artists embraced the desire for painted portraits.

So much so that by the 18th century,

a Scottish painter would be acknowledged to be among the very best in Britain.

When Allan Ramsay was appointed the King's painter in 1761,

he set the pattern for Scottish artists capturing on canvas

the figures and the times that forged Scotland's history.

And the best are all in here, in this suitably imposing building.

One of Edinburgh's dearest treasures.

Built as a shrine to Scotland's heroes hence the statues,

it is in fact the Scottish National Portrait Gallery,

the very first purpose built portrait gallery in the world.

In this building, you can see how portraiture has reflected the changing face of Scotland.

The man in charge is James Holloway.

Do you think Scots have a particular interest in portraiture?

-Is it something that is significant to them?

-That's a very good question.

When you look at the 18th century and the 19th century,

the greatest artists have been portrait painters.

Certainly in the early periods.

There is a way of looking at people,

looking at their characters and there is a sort of Scottish vision.

Do you think there's such a thing as a Scottish face?

Would that be racist to say that?

It probably may well be racist but let's pretend it isn't.

There are faces that you instinctively think of as Scottish.

We bought a marvellous portrait of somebody who was a local defence volunteer in the Second World War.

He was painted as a part of propaganda.

He had a face that could have stepped out of Dad's Army

but he was recognisably Scottish.

You couldn't say that was a Welsh face or an Irish face.

It was a Scottish face.

I'm interested to know, you have numerous pictures of royalty.

Yes we do. We have a fantastic portrait of Mary Queen of Scots.

-A great full-length portrait, one of the most famous portraits of her in the world.

-Can we have a look?

-Of course we can.

-This way?

-Yep.

-Down here and up the staircase.

-You know your way about.

I should do!

What was the purpose of a picture like this?

This was done after her death.

It was. It was painted for her son, James VI

who by that stage had become James I of England.

This painting is a reflection of her, what she looked like and also a comment on her martyrdom.

That red colour, the tablecloth, is the red blood of her martyrdom.

Clearly, it was very important who you married when you were a member of the Royal Family.

-Very much and actually, they used portraits for that.

-In what way?

Portraits were sent out from the Royal Courts

to, say, to a king of prospective brides

they were sent across Europe.

Then they were also sent to embassies to raise the status right across the world.

You had to be careful, otherwise you could get yourself into a Thai bride situation.

This happened with Henry VIII.

There was a very flattering portrait of Anne of Cleves.

-And when she turned up...

-He called her the Flanders Mare.

She didn't live up to Holbein's image at all.

So Mary Queen of Scots, she had suitors as well?

She had lots of suitors, she had three husbands, too.

She was very pretty, very glamorous, a very tall woman,

I think that irritated Elizabeth particularly.

Sketching a painting is an odd thing to do,

but it makes me look at it more carefully.

And it lets me spend a little more time with it.

There's a lovely story that I read.

It was that... Mary Queen of Scots' son,

James VI...

Of course his mother was beheaded...

..and was not buried in Westminster with all the splendour of a queen.

And when he became the King,

he had her body brought...

..to London, and there she was buried

with all the appropriate...respect.

But there's a lovely image,

and he had to do this on the quiet,

because politically, it wasn't very popular.

And so they brought her body on a carriage

in the middle of the night and rode through London

and apparently, as it did,

the streets were lined with supporters of the old Queen

standing there raising lanterns.

So he was a good son after all.

Scotland's first really successful native painter

was Aberdeen-born artist George Jamesone.

His studio still exists on Edinburgh's Royal Mile,

where he worked in the 1630s.

They were temporary premises...

'Jamesone expert Dr Duncan Thomson met me there.

'It's the city's oldest inhabited building

'and we've been allowed access by the owners.'

Ah, this is incredible.

This represents wealth, in a sense, because one would expect

your normal Scottish ceiling of this date

to be open beams painted, which was the cheap way of decorating a room.

This represents a growing prosperity.

So it's very likely that this was Jamesone's ceiling?

I should think it probably was here when he occupied this building.

-So here he is.

-The founder of Scottish Art.

The Founder of Scottish Art?

Well, he's the first major native painter.

There had been foreign painters working in Edinburgh

but he's the first major painter who was actually a Scot.

His background was in the decorative painting tradition,

the people who painted ceilings.

But quite quickly, he becomes a major portrait painter.

And this is his self-portrait?

It is very pretentious in a good sense.

He is advertising himself and advertising what he's capable of.

-This appears to be a portrait of Charles I here.

-Uh-huh.

There's no existing portrait of Charles I by Jamesone.

But it looks as if he did paint one. That's more than likely.

A skull on a shield

which is a common memento mori, a reminder of death,

that life was short.

A very common feature in 17th century art.

I think he is saying... He is a very important figure in Scottish life

and he had a surprising amount of fame during his own lifetime.

There are a number of poems written about Jamesone and what a great painter he was.

Presumably, it was a way to... If someone was famous,

it was the only way to show people how they looked?

That's right.

It is much the same reason as we still have our portraits painted.

There's obviously an element of vanity,

you want to protect yourself from ravages of time, as it were,

you want people to know what you looked like once you've gone -

just as we have portraits painted today.

This promise of immortality

led to a growth in the popularity of portraiture.

By the middle of the 18th century,

it had become the perfect visual form

for exploring the new philosophical ideas of the day,

ideas that were being forged in Scotland's capital.

It was the age of the Enlightenment,

a time when Edinburgh pulsed with intellectual energy.

Almost every aspect of mankind's existence, philosophy, history,

medicine, economics,

was being forensically examined and questioned.

At the time, Scotsmen like philosopher David Hume,

economist Adam Smith and medic Joseph Black

successfully challenged beliefs about the physical world.

Thanks to John Knox and the Reformation,

Scotland was one of the most literate nations in the world.

During the Enlightenment,

it moved to the very centre of European intellectual thought.

Edinburgh was described as the Athens of the North,

and Voltaire declared that, "It is to Scotland that we look for our civilisation."

And this radical shift in Scottish intellectual life

soon found its way into Scotland's art.

Allan Ramsay was born in Edinburgh in 1713.

During his lifetime,

his sophisticated, painterly style

would put Scottish art on the European stage.

He built his reputation

as an intellectual painter

in both Edinburgh and London,

and went on to be hailed as one of the finest portrait painters of his time.

It was Ramsay's belief

that art should be easily understood by anyone.

His paintings should reflect exactly what he saw.

These beliefs brought him close to a man called David Hume,

one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Both men lived in Edinburgh,

they were both founder members of The Select Society,

a distinguished debating club here in the city, and they became firm friends.

It was only natural that Hume's ideas should begin to find expression in Ramsay's art.

Hume believed that the key to understanding the world

was directly through experience and the senses.

And you can see that

in Ramsay's direct and honest portrait of the philosopher.

Here in the Portrait Gallery, I'm going to find out more about

Allan Ramsay from deputy curator Nicola Kalinsky. So who is this?

This is the first Mrs Ramsay, Anne Bayne, about 1739 to 40,

so an early portrait by Allan Ramsay.

So how old would he have been when he painted this?

He's a young man in his early 20s.

He's already made first trip to Italy, where he trained,

and he came back to Britain

and he married Anne Bayne on his return in 1738.

But already a very accomplished painter?

-Yes.

-The pose is quite strange, it seems quite uptight, stiff?

She's a young girl.

She's probably never been painted before,

and she's subject to the intense scrutiny of the artist.

It's probably quite a nerve-wracking thing to do.

If you compare this to commissioned portraits of the period, um,

those portraits that he's paid to do of women,

this is much more intimate and direct.

There is something almost uncomfortable, I think, about the directness of it.

She feels quite exposed.

Yes, her gaze,

when you look at her,

she's saying something...

It's really between... she and her husband, isn't it?

We're probably not supposed to be part of this exchange, perhaps.

She's not really looking at me,

-she's looking at him.

-Yep. Mm.

I love the colour, as well.

At this period, Ramsay is using quite an intense red underpainting

which he would have learnt in the Italian studios,

and that probably gives the face this warmth,

and if you look around the eyes, very warm highlights.

So the red will have gone down first?

-Yes.

-As opposed to later.

-Indeed.

-And then built up with these other layers of paint?

-Mm-hm.

It's a palpable, living, breathing human being.

That's what's amazing about him, I mean, he does...

She's there, she's in that picture.

Yeah, yeah.

She died in 1743, in childbirth, so in fact it was a very short marriage,

just five years, very sad.

So we only know her as a young woman, a young bride.

Right.

Well, that gives an added poignancy to this.

It does indeed, yes.

11 years later, Allan Ramsay married again.

And, of course,

he painted a beautiful portrait of the second Mrs Ramsay.

There's such incredibly...

sensitive and...

delicate painting in this picture,

particularly if you look at the lips.

And I think... what makes this picture...

..one of Ramsay's most celebrated and most famous pictures...

..is not just his handling of light,...

..not just the subtlety

with which he renders...the lace,

the garments, and the clothing,...

..not just the pose, which is...

..Margaret here, I think, has just been arranging flowers

in the vase in their home...

..and appears just to have been...

caught in the moment of doing that.

I think...

it's because you can see...

how much he loves her.

Allan Ramsay was painting at a time

when Scotland's art market had seen considerable change.

The Act of Union in 1707 meant Parliament now followed the Court south,

taking with it long-established patrons of the arts.

Scottish painters had lost the patronage of the Church and of the Royal Court.

Times might have been hard if a new group of benefactors hadn't emerged

in the shape of Scotland's landed gentry and the new middle class.

It was gentry like the Earls of Bute

who built their country pile, Mount Stuart,

in the late 19th century.

The Butes used the same architect

that designed the Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

This sumptuous building houses the fruits of centuries of patronage of the arts.

Allan Ramsay's success as a portrait painter

wasn't just down to his skill alone, it was his personality as well.

His tact and integrity earned him friends in high places.

And he became a particular favourite of John Stuart,

the 3rd Earl of Bute.

Here at Mount Stuart, they have one of the best collections of Ramsays in the world.

'I've had a special invitation to view them

'from the 7th Marquess of Bute himself.'

This is the dining room, Peter, and as you can see,

this is where we have the core of the family portrait collection.

These amazing Ramsays...

Yeah, they're very, very wonderful.

I grew up in this house, I was born on the island and grew up here,

so in a way it's slightly bizarre

in the 20th, 21st century to be brought up in these surroundings.

So this is

the King as Prince Regent...

That's the King.

That's the 3rd Earl there...

The 3rd Earl was the first Scotsman to hold the post of

First Lord of the Treasury, i.e. Prime Minister.

He was, and he had a very

short political career.

He wasn't popular because he was a Scot...

-Oh, dear.

-But I don't think that was the only reason.

He passed unpopular legislation, he introduced a tax on cider,

which obviously didn't go down very well.

Do you have any idea why the 3rd Earl was so taken by Ramsay in the first place?

My understanding is that when Ramsay was in his heyday

he was acknowledged to be the best British portrait artist.

I think when Ramsay got a bit older, and Reynolds had developed,

Reynolds took over that mantle.

I think it really was a case of who is the best portrait artist in Britain?

That man was Allan Ramsay.

-Have you ever had your portrait painted?

-No, I haven't, actually.

-Do you not fancy it?

-I do, quite, but I've never got round to it.

It's difficult to know quite who to go to, isn't it?

I'd probably be more than likely to go for the Lucian Freud type of option.

That'd be fantastic.

I think you'd look quite good in the gear!

If Johnny Bute does get round to having his portrait painted, the snazzy get-up worn by his ancestor

in the show-stopping portraits is kept here at Mount Stuart.

Earl Bute has his breeches...

-There they are.

-This is 250 years old.

And for an incurable old fop like myself, the chance to reach out

and touch the past with Mount Stuart's archivist was irresistible.

You can see how Ramsay's really caught this colour.

This velvet has such variance in tone.

-Beautiful.

-Tightened there, so that the stockings and

the rest of his legs would be shown to the best advantage.

I could slip them on right now!

Remarkable jacket.

This is... Vivienne Westwood, eat your heart out.

Can we see the others...

I'm frightened to touch it, although I'm desperate to try it on.

They're sort of little threads wound onto tiny little wires with little jewel things in them.

This is the business. Beautiful buttons.

I mean, it's actually not garish.

If someone were to describe that to you, you'd think that's a bit of bling,

over the top, but in fact it's very elegant. How old is that?

-250 years.

-250 years old.

And what you have to remember is that Ramsay has looked at this,

he will have had this in his studio so he could get up close to it and do it in detail.

There must have been some mornings when Ramsay must have gone,

"Oh, please, no, don't wear the jacket with the tassels!

"No, the tassels, I'll have to do all of those!

"Can you not just wear a plain pair of... Not velvet again!"

Ramsay's work for the Bute family earned him other fans, too.

They recommended him to the Prince of Wales, the future George III.

And in 1760 he was appointed King's painter.

Ramsay had reached the pinnacle of his career.

But when he died in 1784, another brilliant Scottish portrait painter was poised to take his place.

Edinburgh-born Henry Raeburn

certainly drew on Ramsay's influence,

but it was his bold technique that would make him famous.

We know Raeburn was born in 1756 just downriver from here in Stockbridge,

where the Waters of Leith powered his parents' wool-boiling mill.

We know he was an apprentice goldsmith here in Edinburgh,

we know he studied for a time in Italy, but we don't know how he arrived at his technique.

By the early 1790s Raeburn was displaying an astonishing confidence in the handling of paint.

He was working with a courage, a vigour and a daring

that saw him, quite unlike the more studious Ramsay, rarely bother with any preparatory drawings.

It was just him,

the sitter and that big, blank canvas.

He was working without a safety net.

Raeburn created a purpose-built studio, one of the first in Britain, in Edinburgh's New Town.

Here he could receive his grand subjects in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.

'Today the building houses a media agency.'

-Great view.

-Isn't it?

'But you can still see how Raeburn designed the space to give him precise control over the light.'

The enormous scale of this is because of light?

That's right.

It's facing north, as you can see.

People always say this about artists' studios

having a northern light, I've never really understood what that meant.

It means, basically, the positions of the shadows,

once you've fixed them, don't move because the sun isn't moving.

This is facing north?

It's facing virtually due north, across the Fife.

Because the sun's rising over there and moving that way.

It doesn't really throw any shadows in here.

Shadows, light, were so important to Raeburn.

This was one of his favourite devices in a portrait,

was very carefully controlled lighting.

This window, as you can see, is surrounded by a very complicated set of shutters.

He'd modify where the light was coming from

so it fell on the subject's head or body just exactly as he wanted.

Let's say a sitter's coming along, like Mrs Scott Moncrieff here,

who's this lady in this rather beautiful and alluring picture.

It's quite a racy picture, I think.

Yes, you could say that.

It's got a romantic feeling, it's got quite a distinct erotic feeling. It's a very sensual picture.

But there lot of exposed flesh there, which I'm quite surprised at.

I'm pleased with, but...!

It's a late Empire dress, which emphasised the breasts, showed a lot of the upper area of the chest.

It was nothing unusual, nothing scandalous about this at the time.

Raeburn was obviously...

..quite aware of this lady's charms, he reacted to them.

And hence, when he reacted to the personality

or the individuality of the subject, we got a better painting.

We got a more, in this case, more dramatic, more romantic painting.

He certainly seems to have made a connection.

But you can see how important the light was. The light is 50% of that picture.

But it still looks like a real person.

It looks like a real human being, with a character.

Absolutely. Oh, yes, yes.

If I've come to get my portrait painted,

I'm the Right Honourable Archibald Capaldi of Capaldi,

how would it work?

He would have said - pretty quickly because he worked fast -

"This is where I would like you to stand."

-Up on this...?

-Up on this podium here.

Right, so I'll go up here, OK.

We've had to make do with a coffee table. Why would I be up high like this?

So that the shadows of your features are tending to fall,

shadows under the nose, shadows under the chin, and even shadows under the buttons on your coat.

So how would he actually use the space of the studio, because it's a big room?

The first thing we must do is make sure that these two doors are wide open.

-These ones as well?

-Because Raeburn, besides painting in here, this room was part of the process as well.

So these doors would be wide open so there is extra light coming from

the south side of the building,

which helps light up the shadow side of your face, which was very dark

when only the window was lighting you.

He would then retreat from his easel,

right across where this

boardroom table is sitting at the moment, he would be backing,

he would back right into the other half of this double cube room,

always looking at you, and he would go back as far as he could until he

eliminated the tremendously bright light coming in from the north.

He would stand here sizing up exactly how you look.

And then, very rapidly, he would stride forward, right across where the table is,

go up to the easel, and, without actually looking at you at this point,

he would dash in all the highlights, the forehead, the chin,

these are always painted with very thick, direct impasto.

There was no drawing involved in this.

It was Raeburn's memory and his brush and paint,

and it went directly onto the canvas and it would begin to grow.

So he'd run up and down here doing that?

He's doing a lot of legwork, absolutely.

'The fearlessness of Henry Raeburn's technique,

'combined with his piercing instinct for character, made a formidable combination.

'Centuries later he still exerts a powerful influence over one of Scotland's leading artists.'

Hi, how are you doing? Nice to see you.

Alison Watt's work is bold and original.

She began her career painting portraits,

but now she's found very different subject matter

for her sensual paintings.

From the start, she's had a love affair with Raeburn's work.

I've only ever seen it out of this context once,

because it's always here,

but two years ago I saw it in London at the Royal Academy.

This picture of William Clunes was hung alongside

the greats in European portraiture, so you had David and Ingres

and Reynolds and Gainsborough,

and this picture easily held its own in that company.

I remember thinking how important that would've been to Raeburn,

because throughout his lifetime, he worried about how he was perceived outside of his native Edinburgh.

Here he was, in revered company,

and I think that would've given him a lot of pleasure.

From a painter's point of view, what is interesting to you about this?

The technical virtuosity displayed in this picture is astonishing.

On the one hand he has used an incredibly daring composition...

The first thing I thought was, "Could they not get horse to face us?"

THEY LAUGH

And also, Raeburn has given both animal and sitter a strange kind of equality.

And in certain parts of the painting,

the horse and the sitter mirror each other to balance the painting.

Show us.

These strong dark verticals are incredibly important in the picture.

The four legs of the horse and the legs of Major Clunes.

What's great, getting close up, is we get to see Raeburn's technique.

If you look at the highly-polished riding boots, for example,

you can see his wet on wet technique.

What is wet on wet?

It's when you apply wet paint to paint which is not dry.

It means there's a fluidity to it, but it also means

there's a great amount of skill to working in this way

because you have to employ rapidity in your application of the paint

in order to retain this incredible freshness and immediacy that you can see in the painting.

What I love about that is you can see the action of the artist, you can see the speed

through the brush marks, you can see the paint pulling through the black.

-Yes.

-And it's so assured.

A moment has been trapped in time, you actually see the mark Raeburn made,

and I love to see that in a painting.

Look at the way he's used colour.

If you look at that extraordinary vermilion in the waistcoat,

it has a way of

punctuating the entire painting.

And yet at the same time it holds together the whole composition.

-You mean on his vest?

-Yeah. This incredible colour and the way he's painted it.

The paint looks deceptively simple, it looks as if it's been applied

in flat slabs of colour, and that really accentuates the lighting in the painting.

But the other side of that is he loses none of the important detail.

So he manages to do both. This is really forward-thinking painting.

I think when looking at Raeburn,

you automatically use the words "courage" and "vigour" and "energy".

It's much more than a likeness.

It is lovely.

Until the Enlightenment, Scotland had been something

of an intellectual backwater dominated by a repressive Church.

But by the late 18th century it was Europe's most literate society,

alive with sophisticated thinking and debate.

Scots now led the world in science and medicine,

and the new, deeper understanding of how the human body works was picked up by Scottish artists.

Theories about perception were at the heart of Enlightenment thinking.

Edinburgh intellectuals were wrestling with the big ideas,

and it's obvious from some of his later works that Raeburn was in on the debate.

The fact that perception was a mental process appealed to Raeburn.

His work reflects the idea that the brain can make a meaningful image

out of patterns of tone and colour.

Science and art truly became bedfellows, when Edinburgh surgeon, Charles Bell, produced a book,

On The Anatomy Of Expression In Painting.

It was specifically aimed at artists.

Bell saw an important connection between science and art.

Painting could provide a study of the physical effect of the mind on the body.

Put simply, if you painted somebody's portrait, you got an insight into the sitter's mind.

It was written all over their face.

Scottish painters like David Wilkie

took the new anatomical knowledge to heart.

When he paints his portrait of a whole family,

their expressions make it clear how uncomfortable they are.

Wilkie painted the Chalmers-Bethune family when he was just 19.

It seems to me that the Scottish tradition of portraiture,

which blossomed after the Reformation,

was energised by the Enlightenment,

as artists and philosophers alike explored what it is to be human.

Scotland's forward-thinking men of science and philosophy

had put this small country at the centre of European thought.

And where Ramsay had paved the way, other Scottish painters now followed.

It was a vibrant time of cultural exchange and cross-fertilisation.

Scottish artists, full of Enlightenment ideas,

travelled abroad, where they fully embraced the Continental arts scene.

Inspired by ancient art and literature, they would return home,

to create a new and enduring portrait of Scotland.

The Grand Tour craze was at its height.

Wealthy aristocrats finished their education with an extensive tour of Europe.

The idea was to broaden their horizons with exposure to art and culture.

And it took some dedication.

The guidebooks recommended three hours' sightseeing

each morning for six weeks, and that was just in Rome!

Archaeological discoveries in Italy meant more was known about the classical world than ever before.

This led to a neo-classical revival in art, as painters

re-created in their imagination scenes from ancient Roman history.

Rome's cafes buzzed with intellectual debate.

And at the heart of this community was Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton.

Hamilton was the Scottish Enlightenment's ambassador in Italy.

In a series of epic paintings,

he explored the latest thinking about the origin of society.

Many artists were mining the classical world,

but Hamilton went right back to Homer for inspiration.

Hamilton doesn't glorify violent heroism.

Like Hume, he champions sympathy and compassion.

These are the values that make us human, moral and civilised.

Around Hamilton, with his ground-breaking neo-classical work and gregarious personality,

a new Scottish art school blossomed in Rome.

But unlike the well-funded aristocrats on the Grand Tour, Hamilton had to earn a living.

History painting was his passion, but portraiture offered a steady income.

-There she is.

-Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Gunning.

One of the famous Miss Gunnings.

She was the youngest of two sisters.

Her elder sister was Maria.

Irish. And her mother brought her over to England

to put her on the marriage market.

-And what were they famed for?

-Beauty. Not much else.

The newspapers and magazines of the day, before they got married,

followed their every move, I think waiting for them to fall from virtue.

And this is painted shortly after she got married.

Interesting, though, with all due respect to the Duchess of Hamilton, as was,

it's not the kind of beauty that has the same currency in our society.

That's true. I think she was what we might call a statuesque beauty.

-She's quite big.

-She's a big girl.

Both girls were tall, they had very regular features, apparently, and remarkable figures.

Elizabeth's son

was something of a character.

He was. He possibly took a bit after his father, who was said to have been

a bit of a rake before he married Elizabeth, fond of the gaming table,

fond of ladies and fond of drink.

I think I'd like to meet him.

-Good. Let's go and find him.

-Can we do that?

-Yep.

-All right. That was lovely.

Let's go and see Mrs Hamilton's offspring.

Here he is.

-Douglas.

-Douglas.

-Douglas Hamilton.

-Douglas Hamilton, who becomes the eighth duke.

And this also is painted by Gavin Hamilton.

Yes, but 20 years later.

So he's really quite a hot portrait painter, if he wanted to be?

He could have been. By the time this portrait was being painted,

Gavin Hamilton had really stopped working as a portrait painter.

He didn't need to. He was painting his big, historical canvases,

he was working as an archaeologist, he was working as a dealer.

This is set, clearly, in Italy somewhere.

It's in Rome, and they're looking down onto the Forum.

They're on the Capitol Hill and looking down.

The Forum... If Rome was the high point of the Grand Tour,

the Forum was probably the high point of Rome.

But their interest in the classical world,

it's not just in Roman culture, but it's in Greek culture as well.

Yes, this is the period when it begins to broaden out from Rome

to an even more distant, more authentic past, to Greece.

And because of archaeology, people are beginning to see the ancient world in a different way

-from what they had before, which had been largely imagined.

-Yes. Or literary.

But now they're beginning to accumulate real knowledge.

And a lot of pre-conceptions about the classical past begin to shift as knowledge increases.

Can you give us an idea of Gavin Hamilton's influence and impact?

He begins to define and spread neo-classical taste.

His great history paintings were extremely influential

to the next generation of artists all across Europe.

And the generation that followed Hamilton

no longer had to rely solely on their imagination.

The new science of archaeology was providing physical evidence

of classical art, going right back to Homer's time.

Recently discovered ancient pottery showed people in profile, rather than face on.

David Allan,

one of Hamilton's young proteges, used this evidence when he painted

Pliny's classical legend,

which describes the origin of painting itself.

Who knows who painted the first picture or made the first drawing,

who knows where it was, whether it was on a cave wall or on a sandy beach.

Nobody knows.

But there is a legend that was created by Pliny in Roman times...

..of the origin of painting.

And the legend features Dibutades,

the daughter of a Corinthian potter...

..who, on the eve of battle,

sketches her lover's profile

cast from his shadow on the wall.

It's a legend, really, that says

the first picture

was a portrait,

and that the reason that it was done

was love.

But another interesting point,

to me, anyway, about this picture,

is if we look at the young man's profile,

we'll see, as has been remarked many times before...

..that the classical profile

is shared with none other than the King himself, Elvis Presley.

This classical Lisa Marie Presley

is drawing the quiff of her lover.

HE IMITATE ELVIS SINGING

Elvis has left the museum.

Fascination with ancient history was not confined to Gavin Hamilton's circle in Rome.

Here in Scotland, the discovery of an epic poem,

written in Gaelic, was about to ignite an interest in the primitive past.

The man behind the discovery was James Macpherson, who claimed to have found fragments of poetry

written by a Celtic bard named Ossian.

When the work was published in the 1760s, Ossian was hailed as Scotland's answer to Homer.

Scottish artists turned their back on the ancient classical world

in favour of their own primitive past.

I'm following the path taken by hordes of tourists,

all keen to see the memorial to Ossian created in the 18th century by the Duke of Atholl,

here on his estate.

-Hi, Ben. How are you doing?

-Welcome. Thank very much.

'The fact that Ossian turned out to be largely fake didn't diminish its reception.'

This was the number one best-seller of its day.

Napoleon carried a copy, everybody had copies.

This became a cult, a craze.

-But whether he really existed, who knows?

-But as a character, he became very powerful.

-As a character, he was very real.

-But he certainly was believed in.

What he stood for was believed in, the fact he stood for heroic deeds and fantastic tales

and story-telling, and a very strong culture going way back into the distant past.

-So he gave Scotland an identity?

-Going way back, yes.

And this is his house.

Not so much a house, it's a memorial to Ossian.

-And that's what we're going to see now.

-That's exactly what we're going to see now.

WATERFALL GUSHES

So the ladies and gentleman who came here, what would they have been confronted with here?

They'd be confronted with the round end of the building, the stone door. So you push open the door,

and as you come in, that's when you'd be confronted, in the gloom, with Ossian appearing before you.

And also notice how you've almost lost the sound of the waterfall.

Oh, yeah, you can hardly hear it.

It's gone very quiet.

But then you come forward.

WATERFALL ROARS

And you'd have been taken to the main chamber.

-And you have the roar.

-And the roar.

When you go through, you come out to the falls. They're lovely. Absolutely beautiful.

Oh, my God. Fantastic.

"Beneath the aged trees, old Ossian sat on the moss

"The last of the race of Fingal

"I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones

"What dost thou, O river, to me?"

The popularity of Ossian proved there was a real appetite for authentic Scottish heritage.

So when a new, and genuine, rustic poet emerged, in the shape of Robert Burns,

a farmer's son from Ayrshire, his public were ready and waiting.

When Robert Burns arrived in Edinburgh in 1786,

all he had to his name was a small volume of poetry called Poems, Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect.

Not the catchiest of titles.

But it became a literary sensation.

All of Edinburgh wanted to meet the ploughman poet, and very soon Burns found himself drinking

with Enlightenment philosophers and making eyes at eminent socialites.

Of course, Burns was a poet, not a painter,

but it was his attitude to his own image that would help cement his reputation

as one of the great icons of Scottish culture.

It seems to me we have a very specific view of Burns, visually.

The best known portraits of Burns

result from the production of the Edinburgh Edition in 1787,

that is the Nasmyth oil and the Beugo engraving.

And we've a very interesting comparison between these two.

-This is the image that most people would recognise.

-That's the chocolate box poet.

So his opinion of this was what?

His opinion was that it didn't catch the likeness as well

as the engraving that was derived from it.

He has hardened the features.

This has the stamp of authenticity that the original oil lacks.

This one here, he looks a bit meatier.

He looks bit more like Sean Connery!

He looks more able to hold a plough,

and actually more like the ploughman poet.

You can imagine that below here were the farmers boots, which so attracted the ladies of Edinburgh.

The one I like the best is this one at the end.

The Reid miniature.

I don't know whether that's because it's so different from the others.

This was done about a year before Burns' death.

We know that he himself liked this.

He seems to have caught Burns entirely to Burns' satisfaction.

I wonder if he thought this was his good side?

Because they're all from this side!

-Did he have a horrible wart or something?!

-He may have done!

You know, if this had happened in the 20th century,

you'd almost think that some design consultant

-had said to Robert Burns, "Let's just make one image."

-Mm. But it's all...

"Let's get one image and put that out there, and just hit it again and again and again."

But 20th century, or 21st century marketing is nothing new.

They knew all about it in the 18th century. You had to sell yourself.

You had to sell an image. Pictures sold books.

And yet, in doing that, Beugo gave us the definitive image of Burns, for all time.

'Contemporary Scottish artist Calum Colvin has an inventive take on portraiture.

'Calum's subverted iconic Scottish images throughout his career.

'And I get the impression Burns particularly intrigues him.'

What's great about this, and I really like your work...

but it's usually always seen, obviously, in photographic form...

-Mm-hm.

-..and in a way, this is what the photograph always tempts me to do,

-is to come to the place where the bits are.

-Mm-hm.

And find the spot where all the bits coalesce into the portrait.

Uh-huh. If you look at a work of art and just move on,

it hasn't really done its job.

And I think with my work,

even if they don't like it, people feel obliged to try to figure out what it is they're looking at.

So this mixture of painting, sculpture, photography...

There is kind of process of decoding.

As I often do with pictures, it's a basic structure

from an original image, which I subvert, and turn into something else.

Yeah. But how do you create...?

How do you break the image of Burns down into the bits?

I have all my props... If you imagine an unpainted set of props,

and then I get an acetate, something like...

This is taken from a stamp that I found in a book of Burns ephemera.

-This is what I made...

-Right.

-A kind of template.

-Right.

-And then I kind of look and figure out,

-I want this kind of rearing, rebel horse...

-Right.

-And I want Burns to appear within that.

-Uh-huh.

-Then I knew that I was gonna paint the flag over the thing.

So I look and I move around. And once I've decided the position, I move my camera, which is over here,

-into that position.

-Mm-hm.

-And then it's just a simple...

It is simple, but it's a laborious process, of just painting.

I'm interested in the fact that this is actually a very radical form of portraiture.

That you're still very deliberately painting a picture,

a recognisable picture, of a human being.

-Robbie Burns appears in quite a lot of your work.

-Yes.

Do you respond then to the political element in him?

There are all kinds of elements, I think.

And that's the beauty of Burns.

It's like an allegorical life.

You can pick up so many things from it.

There's Burns the rebel, Burns the radical, Burns the lover, Burns the icon.

And so you can use an image of Burns to have a go, as I'm doing here,

to have a go at bankrupt capitalism, if you like.

-Yes.

-That particular period in Scottish history I find fascinating,

because it's the period when Scotland's history is forged.

And the notion that a country's culture is part-history, part-invention.

-It is open, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-It's, erm, yep...

-It takes a bit of practice.

-Oh, it's upside down!

-It's upside down, yeah.

You didn't tell me that.

That's great.

This forging of Scottish identity by writers and artists

would soon produce a new and enduring portrait of Scotland.

By the end of the 18th century,

Scotland was the fastest-industrialising nation in Europe.

Enlightenment faith in reason and progress seemed out of tune with the times.

It was replaced by a Romantic obsession with imaginative freedom,

as artists sought refuge in the natural world.

Scottish painters now explored human experience on a broader canvas,

defining the Highlands as a rural idyll, an almost utopian society.

The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars in 1799 put an end to the typical Rome-centred Grand Tour.

So would-be tourists were looking elsewhere to experience ancient culture.

And one increasingly popular location was the Scottish Highlands.

The poetry of Ossian and Burns had already created a romantic image of the Highlands,

and the work of Walter Scott would soon make them Europe's new must-see destination.

Sir Walter Scott's ears are proving very difficult to find for me.

Erm... That's what they said of Scott -

for all his imagination and vigour, he had very, very flat ears.

They didn't really say that, I said that.

Scott's first novel, Waverley, came out in 1814, and became a bestseller across Europe.

It's the story of a young Englishman who travels to the Highlands,

at a turbulent time in Scotland's history.

Scott describes the landscape as sublimely romantic,

and the Highlanders themselves as brutal but loyal.

There. That'll do.

Waverley changed the way Scots saw their own past, and boosted the country's image abroad.

And it transformed how the Highlands were perceived.

The desolate landscape was given a new spin -

it was romantic. And ironically, it very quickly became filled up with tourists in search of emptiness.

Almost single-handedly, Walter Scott brought together all the elements

that would gel in the global imagination into the Scottish stereotype.

And it's an identity that persists to this very day.

By the mid-19th century, the Highlands had become an aristocratic adventure playground -

a development symbolised by the rebuilding of Balmoral Castle

as a holiday home for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Its surrounding wildlife was immortalised by English painter Edwin Landseer.

This portrait celebrates a Highland pleasure ground,

where hunting the noble stag was a popular sport.

It's still an image with great international currency.

But it's bogus.

It's an anachronism.

Scotland seen through the eyes of Victorian landed gentry.

And it overlooks the dark side to all this romantic emptiness.

The fact that this deserted landscape was silent witness to the tragedy of the Clearances.

It was an uncomfortable fact that the pleasure-seeking Victorians chose to overlook.

Emigration from Scotland had been going on since the middle of the 18th century.

But during the infamous Highland Clearances,

tens of thousands of people were driven out to make way for sheep farming.

In a generation, Scotland lost its clan system and a way of life that had existed for hundreds of years.

Whole communities were obliterated,

leaving an eerily empty landscape.

The Clearances were, and still are, an emotive subject,

one that was tackled by several artists.

But most seemed defeated by the sheer human scale

of what was one of the greatest social transformations in Scottish history.

This image of the Clearances

was painted by Thomas Faed, a Scottish artist based in London.

It's one of the very few contemporary comments on the tragic period.

But it's a sentimentalised image to suit Victorian tastes.

In paintings by Glasgow artist Horatio McCulloch,

the Scottish people themselves are conspicuous by their absence.

McCulloch, like Scott, romanticised the Highland landscape,

and played a major part

in cementing the stereotyped portrait of Scotland.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the harsh reality of human experience during The Clearances

was at odds with the romantic myth.

The Highlanders that remained were struggling to survive.

And many were drawn to Scotland's booming cities.

Across Britain, the Industrial Revolution was transforming people's worlds.

Almost every aspect of life was affected by the explosion of technology.

By the end of the 19th century, Scotland was changing.

Glasgow had been transformed into a great industrial city

and trading port, and was second only to London

as the driving force behind the British Empire.

Glasgow now lead the world in shipbuilding.

It throbbed with the sounds of thriving industry.

Here was a city of wealth and self-confidence -

all fuel for a burgeoning arts scene.

In May 1901, one of Britain's greatest art collections

was brought together here at Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Back in Allan Ramsay's day, the main patrons of the arts were royalty and toffs.

But, gradually, democracy was filtering into the world of art.

And here in Glasgow, wealthy industrialists were now backing the city's cultural explosion.

As well as acquiring work by up-and-coming Scottish artists.

These forward-thinking newcomers to the art scene

acquired a taste for modern European art.

Key to satisfying their appetite, was Alexander Reid,

a Glaswegian art dealer.

This portrait of him was painted by his former flatmate in Paris -

Vincent Van Gogh.

In 1892, Degas' daring painting of a prostitute

went up for sale in London.

The public greeted this "degenerate" image with hisses.

But Reid bought it, and quickly sold it on to a Glasgow businessman.

At a time when Whistler and Millais were the big names in London,

Reid's gallery was championing the French Impressionists,

Japanese prints, and a new group of Scottish painters.

The opening night of their first group exhibition

was the social event of the year.

And the word was, these artists were the next big thing.

They were dubbed The Glasgow Boys, and for the next 20 years,

they revolutionised Scottish painting.

The Boys, as they preferred to be known,

took new painting styles from Europe and made them their own.

Their figurative work focused on real people,

often painted in the open air.

They were rebelling against

traditional Victorian sentimentality.

We can see quite clearly the contrast

between this totally unsentimental image...

-Exactly.

-..and this slightly more chocolate boxy, theatrical...

It is, it is exactly chocolate box.

Thomas Faed, here, is painting

the kind of picture that they objected to.

Because he's taking a scene from everyday life, if you like,

but sentimentalising it -

a rather patronising view of the working classes.

I mean, The Boys called this kind of painting gluepot.

Glue pot...

Glue pot. Because the...

I mean, lesser painters than Faed, who worked in this manner,

they weren't terribly good painters.

And they would hide their, er, inadequacies by giving their pictures

a coat of dark brown varnish, which immediately made them look like

-old master paintings.

-Yes.

They were called glue pots because, like glue, it had to be melted

-in a pot on a stove.

-Yes.

And it was a lovely term of abuse that The Boys would use regularly.

Yes, I like it. What's lovely about this as well is, again, and you see

it over and over again, it's what painting is so much about, is light.

Yes, but here, you're very much aware of the brush.

This was a technique The Boys used to create perspective.

They would put their figures up against

the plane of the canvas like this, and the faces would be detailed.

-Yes.

-But to create depth,

they made the brush strokes of the supposed distance broader and softer.

Right. So these actual...

The size of the blocks of colour that they use,

do you use larger blocks further away, and smaller ones closer?

-Yes. Absolutely.

-As we can see around here.

This is one of the earliest pictures, erm,

-that showed Guthrie's promise.

-Aha.

In 1881, he went to Brig o' Turk

and a young boy died in the burn.

And Guthrie made a sketch of all of the villagers

and the young boy's friend, standing outside his cottage,

with the coffin across two chairs.

He came back to Glasgow, and he spent winter painting this picture.

And so you've just got this line of light, which silhouettes the heads,

so your eye is drawn to this, kind of, crosshair

of the constant horizontal with each of the heads

making a vertical and propping up through it.

And also you see the courage of actually losing...

..detail. Losing the dog, losing the shapes of the chair,

the shapes of the coffin, etc.

I think it's wonderful.

I can see how Guthrie was influenced

by the Impressionist approach to tone and light.

Which was all about capturing a moment in time.

And with the rise of the photographic portrait,

painters were now free to express nature rather than simply mirror it.

By the turn of the century, artists all over Europe were absorbing

revolutionary ideas in science, psychology and philosophy.

New knowledge about the mind and how we perceive the world

lead to radical changes in artistic representation.

The basis of modernism, as it would come to be known,

was that experience is fragmented.

A person is more than the sum of their parts.

Paris had overtaken Rome as the place for artists to study.

And it was here that an influential group of Edinburgh artists,

now known as the Scottish Colourists, all spent time.

They were heavily influenced by what they learnt in France,

and were responsible for bringing

vivid and daring colour to Scottish art.

Here at Edinburgh's City Art Centre,

I'm meeting one of their masterpieces -

the Blue Hat,

by the most experimental of the Scottish Colourists, JD Fergusson.

Very much a private viewing we've got here.

Just me and the dozens of you out there.

It's fantastic.

This is one of the most important pictures

in the development of Scottish art.

And I'm gonna have a little go at sketching it.

I don't quite know how I'm going to, er, do this.

Because this image is, above all else, painterly.

I think I'm gonna have to put the old specs on here.

Ah, they're over there. I'll have to go and get them.

Ah!

It's the wrong specs!

Sorry about this!

Ah...

But for Scottish art and Scottish portraiture,

there's a new vigour here, new energy.

A boldness with line and colour.

An almost abstract quality.

It's almost cubist in its execution.

I think it's a great shame ladies don't wear hats like this any more.

Or gentlemen, really.

This lovely cheekbone.

It's caught by the light.

The modernist movement would lead to

dramatic new artistic styles across Europe.

Artists were producing work unlike anything seen before.

But in Scotland, the artists remained fascinated

with painting people, as they'd always been.

The children living in Glasgow's slums

featured in Joan Eardley's work.

While many of John Bellany's paintings

drew on the east coast fishing community where he grew up.

When Bellany was studying at Edinburgh College of Art,

he met John Byrne - another artist

who was drawn to painting the human form.

Here was someone who was not only a painter,

but would also go on to write highly influential plays

that would formulate the way

modern Scotland was beginning to see itself.

He was among a group of popular revolutionaries who injected humour,

style and rock'n'roll into the drab world of '70s Scottish culture.

You look great.

Byrne believes that for artists,

the human form has a special significance.

You've chosen time and time again to return

to the face and to the portrait. What is it about the...?

Well, it's... I mean, every time it's about people,

about the whole of life, the whole of your...

We are people who take a particular form. Er...

And I know it's, er...

..was or is more admired that you do something else,

because a painting is itself, it doesnae need to depict anything.

Give us peace. We're people who think and dream

and work and do things, and engage with other people.

A photograph doesnae do it.

-Yes.

-A painting does it.

It's a shocking thing to see a great painting of a human being.

It's really, really shocking.

Cos there's much more to it than just a likeness,

or what you see on the canvas.

And how do you feel about, for instance, that, you know,

the hugely celebrated Henry Raeburn

or Allan Ramsay...?

Er...

I rate Allan Ramsay very, very highly indeed.

I love Ramsay's portraits. And Raeburn is wonderful.

They were slightly...

You always notice, the nostrils are always red in Raeburn's...

LAUGHTER

Absolutely. Aye, he's got a formula.

That's such a painter thing to do, is to spot immediately...

I'll be looking at that all the time.

But Allan Ramsay is just wonderful.

But given that you clearly have this enormous gift for drawing,

how do you get it to the level that you have it at?

Ah, but you do it every day anyway.

And, er... Oh, God.

To draw something is to understand it.

When you do a portrait you try and get the whole person,

and their mind, and their brain, and their dreams,

and all their...as well as just their physical appearance.

You try and embody that. And then something magical happens.

Mmm.

When John Byrne was a student in the early '60s,

he became friends with another young figurative painter

who, like Byrne, would be an inspiration

to the next generation of Scottish artists.

Sandy Moffat was a hugely influential artist and tutor

who arrived at Glasgow School of Art when I was in my third year.

You, erm, came to Glasgow School of Art

in the year that, er, our friend Mrs Thatcher came to power.

Er, and I just wondered if you had any feelings

about her influence on art?

Well, I think that was a defining moment for Scottish art,

for Scottish culture, in a sense.

-We were being ruled by a party in London, that...

-Yeah.

..I think none of us had even voted for.

-Yes.

-One single Scottish Tory MP.

So I think this was something which did affect artists,

really quite deeply. I mean, writers, musicians, everyone.

So in many ways, Thatcher was actually a beneficial figure

for Scottish art and artists.

Yes, because she provided this well of anger.

Absolutely. We had to react.

We couldn't just sit around on the fence any more.

-No.

-Something had to be done.

-Yeah.

In the face of Thatcherism.

something of a cultural renaissance emerged in Scotland.

For a group of Sandy Moffat's students,

it was an extraordinarily creative time.

Steven Campbell, Peter Howson,

Adrian Wiszniewski and Ken Currie, amongst others,

were taking the Scottish tradition

of painting portraits and people to a new level.

So Moffat set up New Image Glasgow, to showcase their work.

The New Image Glasgow show was put together in a matter of weeks.

The break was that the show was taking place

at the same time as the Edinburgh Festival.

So all the London critics came over and they were all knocked out!

Waldemar Januszczak of the Guardian said,

"This is the greatest show, this is what...

"This has completely blown away everything that's happening in London."

Yeah. Is there a moment when you have a first inkling

that there's something special going on?

When I first came across Howson, for example,

you could see that it was, kind of, different.

But he was a fantastic student.

I mean, he had huge talent, incredible talent.

I mean, Currie was painting paintings in his third year that,

erm, well, quite frankly, they were mature masterpieces.

And what Campbell was doing was, nobody had seen the likes of that.

And such labour.

I mean, the work that these guys put in...

None of them ever neglected this idea of painting as a craft.

And the only way you can deal with that is putting in 12 hours a day.

Whatever it is you do with a pencil, or a paint brush,

you've got to go over it again and again, as it were.

It's got to be mastered.

And then after that, then you can begin to say things, as it were.

If I imparted anything at all to the young Peter Howson,

or the young Stephen Campbell or the young Ken Currie,

it was along those lines.

That, in a way, Scottish art had to raise the bar.

They were the ones that could do this.

But they had to set themselves

against the very best from elsewhere.

Not just in the present, but they had to look at the past as well.

The New Glasgow Boys, as they came to be known,

shifted the centre of Britain's art scene away from London.

The late Stephen Campbell, with his dream-like symbolism,

took America by storm.

Peter Howson took his inspiration from Glasgow -

in particular, the city's tough underbelly,

from where he fashioned a cast of bruised and shattered heroes.

I first met Peter at art school, from where he'd vanished,

only to return and astound us with the news

that he'd been in the army.

We didn't realise it then, but this was a hint of the drama

that would follow him throughout his career.

I caught up with him at his Glasgow studio.

I was hoping to introduce...

..fire down here, you know.

Er, possibly a bit of fire there.

Or to do with, erm...

..Dante's red...

The great thing about painting is, if you make mistakes, with oil,

like, say you smudge something, then...

You can't do that with any other medium.

You can go over it. The beauty of oil paint is that it lives and breathes.

But it's amazing even the difference that that's made, I mean, to that...

Well, it just adds a bit of warmth.

Put in a touch of...that will catch the light in the fire.

You know, that's coming from here. And then...

I'm interested to know, from a technical point of view...

..with this picture, how much do you know where you're going with this?

It can go in any direction that I feel led to go.

At the moment, that...

I mean, the other... A few month...

-This has been on the go for quite a long time.

-Ah-ha.

That has suddenly appeared,

and I don't even know what that is at the moment.

So that wasn't in the original concept.

-No.

-And it may not be there in the end?

It might not be in the end.

It's quite a dangerous place,

this place that you paint?

No, not for me. I like it in there!

I like... The idea of...

..of going in and out of these paintings

is what appeals to me, really.

This skyline that we see here is so utterly Glaswegian.

Er, and I just wonder how much Glasgow is a part of your work?

Oh, yeah, it's a massive part of my work, really.

It's the only place I could really ever work in is Glasgow.

You seem to take it and expand it,

and turn it into a biblical, kind of, epic sort of place?

That's the only way of doing it.

That's the only way of doing it, Peter. That's the kind of whole...

You can't just...

What I wanted to do with Glasgow is turn it into a mythical place,

like a kind of Blake-ian place, where you would get streetlamps and cars,

and also dragons and monsters.

The thing about the Glasgow Group, the Glasgow Boys,

whatever you want to call us - it wasn't a kind of shallow thing.

This was a legitimate movement.

-Yes.

-What is Scotland really like?

You know, what is it like to live in Glasgow? What's Scotland really like?

How can we bring in the whole world into this, but still make it Glasgow?

I... Obviously there was elements that I recognised,

because I come from Glasgow.

But I thought the work was totally universal.

And that was the exciting, kind of dazzling thing,

was to see aspects of your own culture,

that you were familiar with, exploding into this world

of visions and painting, erm, that was new.

Mmm. I know. It was amazing. It was a great feeling.

It was a great feeling.

Well done, that was great.

It was great. Very good.

I hope I haven't got paint on you now. Let me just...

This is, er... I don't think the BBC will pay my dry-cleaning bill!

Maybe I can sell it!

LAUGHTER

The generation of artists

that followed the painterly New Glasgow Boys

have been experimenting with new forms of media.

They've moved beyond the formal portraiture of Ramsay and Raeburn,

but the tradition those great painters established

still influences Scottish artists.

1996 Turner Prize winner, Douglas Gordon, created a self-portrait

that plays on the image of four famous faces.

And Turner nominee, Christine Borland's work

investigates issues of identity.

Glasgow-based artist, Roddy Buchanan uses video to create portraits

of Scottish communities and working class life.

It's perhaps too soon to know if the artists who are important today

will be significant to future generations.

But Buchanan's work shows that in Scottish contemporary art,

portraits and people are still a central theme.

For me, it's been a delight

to spend time with some of Scotland's most exciting artists

and with these remarkable works.

It's made me think about my own love of portraiture.

It seems to me that the gift of the artist

is to capture something of the person

that cannot be found in words,

and can only be told in the picture.

And it's in the pictures

that Scotland's people and history are with us still.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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