Episode 2 The Story of Scottish Art

'Rome -

'for centuries, artists have been visiting the city.

'They come to admire, to learn from a civilisation immortalised

'through its architecture and its art.

'20 years ago, I came here, too, on my own artistic pilgrimage.'

I came here to study the monuments and the sculptures which had

so impressed generations of aspiring artists before me.

And here, at the Villa Borghese, I spent days sketching, measuring

myself up against masterpieces by Bernini, Canova and Caravaggio.

But the one thing that I never did was look up.

'Here, on the ceiling of Salon XIX, are exquisite paintings.

'For all outward appearances,

'they bear the hallmarks of a Renaissance master,

'but in fact they are by a man with a very un-Italian name,

'Gavin Hamilton, a fellow Scot.

'I really should have paid more attention.'

When you think of ceilings and you think of Rome, it's always

Michelangelo that comes to mind, not the story of Scottish art.

But the fact is that if Scottish art is about anything,

it's contradictions and surprises.

And the work of Gavin Hamilton is no exception,

because these images,

like so much of what we're going to encounter,

well, they're unexpected and they really do deserve closer examination.

'Hamilton was one of a whole new generation of Scottish artists

'who in the 18th century were about to dazzle their compatriots.'

Scots emerged blinking into the sunlight.

They were coming from a society where art had been suppressed,

a place of sobriety and restraint.

But in Italy, they would be intoxicated by what they encountered.

Tanked up on history, ideas and culture,

their imaginations would be unleashed.

'Such polarising experiences sparked a powerful creative tension...

'..and it is tension

'that characterises this period above all else,

'tension between the shackles of the past

'and the freedom of bold new ideas,

'between seductive myth and the sober reality,

'between the driving forces of reason, restraint and romance.

'And, for me, it is this tension that prompted the greatest

'blossoming of visual art in Scotland's history.'

From the ashes of the Reformation, a new country,

a new culture emerged, and it was built on art.

"Whatsoever is added to God's word by man's device, seem it never

"so good or holy or beautiful.

"Yet before God, which is jealous and cannot admit any companion or

"counsellor, it is wicked, evil and abominable."

Those are the words of John Knox,

the clergyman who led the Scottish Protestant Reformation.

"Be in no doubt, Catholic adornment is out. Put nothing in its place."

In the 16th century,

Scotland's creative landscape was lost in the shadows.

The message remained stark and plain.

Put your faith in words, not in pictures.

And yet, as the 18th century dawned, it would

in fact be words that would herald a golden age of Scottish artistry.

But these wouldn't be the words of God,

they'd be the words of enlightened minds, of authors, historians

and philosophers who didn't distinguish between intellectual

and artistic endeavour.

'This was the age of the Scottish Enlightenment.

'In 1707, the Act of Union with England had transformed

'Scottish society.

'Scotland's politicians

'and aristocrats had migrated south to Westminster.

'But you'd be surprised what can happen when the toffs leave town.

'A new identity was emerging, built from the ground up.

'Here, at the National Portrait Gallery,

'the walls are graced with the noblemen

'and monarchs who for centuries held sway over Scottish life.

'But now intellectuals, scholars and writers took centre stage,

'men such as the philosopher David Hume.'

This painting was created by the first artist in Scottish history who

could indisputably be described as brilliant,

Allan Ramsay.

He was a man with the skills.

I mean, he could really have transformed his subject,

slimmed him down and given him

the kind of chiselled nobility that his stature demanded.

But he didn't.

I'm familiar with that delicate little problem.

Should I perform a little bit of painted liposuction on that

prodigious double chin just to please the client?

And I'm not being trite here.

It's crucial to our understanding of Ramsay, of Hume, indeed

of the Enlightenment, that this artist chose not to gild the lily,

so that when an artist like Ramsay began to create a painting,

he was doing so intellectually.

He said himself that art should be grounded in what is in front of you.

So what we've got here is David Hume viewed square on, without any

flourish or fanfare.

He's simply materialising out of the darkness,

a real human presence, just waiting for the conversation to start.

'And it was debate that really fuelled the cultural

'revolution in which Ramsay was immersed.

'Mathematicians, historians, economists

'and philosophers liberally exchanged new ideas, and not just in salons

'and lecture halls but in the coffee houses and taverns.'

So all these discussions

and debates weren't just restricted to an intellectual elite, then.

No, I don't think they were.

People are reading about it in their magazines or their newspapers,

and if they're not able to do that, those

ideas are in the streets, they're in the streets.

So culture's really being unleashed.

The floodgates have opened, and people are finding access to

-things they might not have encountered 40, 50 years ago.

-Yeah.

Quite a number of the individuals at that time were multitasking.

I mean, look at the idea of a male role today, you know,

the stay-at-home dad who happens to be professionally

trained as an accountant and does whatever else,

actually, it's not a new thing.

An artist like Allan Ramsay, he's dipping his toes into philosophy

and thinking and writing, as well.

You could be a philosopher, an artist, an engineer,

all in the one person, and that was allowed, feasible.

Yeah. People were much more open-minded.

They didn't categorise things in the same way as we do now, and

that's one of the reasons why it's such an exciting period, actually.

Do you think this would have happened without the Act of Union?

Many people think that that was certainly a pivot point

in terms of Scottish culture and Scottish life,

and what it also did was actually make major possibilities

and opportunities for people to go elsewhere,

so it's very noticeable

that Scotland is very open to making the most

of those opportunities and engaging with what's happening elsewhere.

And Allan Ramsay was no exception. Born in Edinburgh in 1713,

his father was an eminent Scottish poet.

But Ramsay set his sights on conquering London,

a crowded marketplace where ambitious artists competed to flatter

the wealthiest patrons.

Just look at the work of Ramsay's chief rival, Joshua Reynolds.

Wigs were mighty, cheeks were powdered, and no matter how

pigeon-toed, on canvas you became as nimble-footed as a prima ballerina.

Ramsay, however, wasn't quite so accommodating.

Anne Cockburn, Lady Inglis, is not a looker,

all wrapped up in her bonnet, hunkered in the shadows.

You couldn't imagine a composition that was more uptight,

more Presbyterian.

But with so very little, Ramsay manages to communicate so much.

I mean, all that darkness, all that restraint, what it does is

it draws you in towards the face, that place of reason and emotion.

And when you get there, you realise that this isn't a stern

and unapproachable painting.

Lady Inglis might feel a little bit anxious at all this scrutiny,

but there's great warmth here, there's honesty, there's respect.

'You'd imagine such Presbyterian restraint would limit Ramsay's

'appeal, especially in the rarefied circles of London society.

'And yet, just two years after setting up his studio

'here in Covent Garden, he declared, "I have put them all to flight

'"and now play first fiddle myself."

'And he wasn't exaggerating. Ahead of Reynolds and Gainsborough,

'he was appointed Painter in Ordinary to King George III.

'In his royal portraits, it is clear that he could evoke swagger

'and splendour with the best of them.

'But what makes him unique is that with it, he brings an honesty,

'a tangibility.

'These remain real people.'

But you'd be mistaken if you thought that Ramsay's style was

a distillation of Scottish first principles.

In fact, his technique betrayed what the contemporary artist

William Hogarth sneeringly described as "Ramsay's foreign flourish".

His most important painting lessons hadn't been

learnt in Presbyterian Scotland, nor were they honed here in London,

but in a much more torrid climate.

'The Grand Tour was a desirable part

'of any well-heeled gentleman's education.

'But for an artist of the Enlightenment such as Ramsay,

'it would be essential.

'The ancient world offered the promise of communing with

'a society not ruled by God

'but by thought.

'Now, I've never really been a child of my time, and when I was 18

'I emulated their journeys and spent a year in the Eternal City.'

And I really do remember the first morning, when I came out,

and 2,000 years of history hit me slap in the face.

Well, I mean, that was it. I just couldn't stop drawing

and sketching for the whole year afterwards.

Arriving in Rome, for me, had been like a kind of visual detonation,

and everything that I saw after that hit me like a chain reaction

of fizzing masterpieces and historical icons.

But for a cultural tourist like Ramsay,

coming from a place where the Renaissance had been forbidden,

well, I mean, the experience must have been hallucinogenic.

'Like me, Ramsay's real training as an artist began here, in Rome.

'He arrived in 1736, at the age of 23.

'Over the next two years,

'he learned to draw from the antique monuments and sculptures.'

The subtle modulations of form, the shadows, the proportions,

the perspective, every single classical sculpture,

no matter how boring you might initially find it,

is an extraordinary challenge, and Ramsay was up to the task.

I mean, his drawings, not only from sculptures but from the life

models that he would have encountered at the French Academy here in Rome,

perhaps drawing from the nude model for the first time...

..well, they're beautiful...

..stunning...

exquisite examples of his artistry.

Now, meticulous draughtsmanship really does underpin Ramsay's

greatest portraits,

but one of the most surprising techniques that he learnt

here in Rome was the habit of underpainting the first

stages of his portraits with a layer of blood-red pigment.

Now, this was a really shocking technique that was completely

unheard of in London.

But I also feel that it represents a kind of metaphor for the true

Allan Ramsay, the real character of the man,

because on the surface, his greatest portraits appear to be all about

restraint and poise, but in actual fact this isn't porcelain

perfection, this isn't emotional sterility.

Beneath that precision,

there are really powerful emotions churning in Ramsay's portraits.

Ramsay's life was full of personal tragedy.

Both his wives and one of his sons died young.

The image of his dead child is almost unbearable to contemplate.

But even when I look at the portraits of his two wives,

I get the impression that the feelings pulsing beneath that

fragile film of paint are so violent they threaten to burst

through at any point.

'Like so many artists before and since,

'Allan Ramsay had found his first taste of Italy sparked

'a passion for the place, and he would return throughout his life.

'But a fellow Scottish artist would find the experience

'so powerful that he would turn his back on Scotland altogether.

'Gavin Hamilton was born to a prominent family in Lanarkshire.

'He came to Italy for the first time in 1744, a decade after Ramsay.

'But while Ramsay was clearly influenced by the art that

'he encountered in Rome, Hamilton was determined to emulate it.

'Seduced by the myths and legends of the classical world,

'he would devote the rest of his life to painting on an epic scale,

'taking on the most ambitious form of art,

'history painting.'

These great historical images aren't just theatrics, you know.

They're not just illustrations of Greek mythology.

Gavin Hamilton was intellectually engaged in the subject,

and he wanted to provoke in his audience really powerful emotions.

These are paintings that bring to life the big debates about

honour, virtue, the decent way to live your existence in a moral world.

They were great lessons that people went to contemplate.

'You could not find more contrasting artists in style and subject matter

'than Gavin Hamilton and Allan Ramsay,

'and yet they were both artists of the Enlightenment.

'Both were wrestling with profound questions.

'And both had interests far beyond the canvas.

'And for these two men,

'it was classical antiquity that captured their imagination.

'The study of Roman archaeology has been luring foreigners to

'Italy for centuries,

'men such as Professor Bernie Frischer.'

Gavin Hamilton was famous as a painter,

and he came to Rome because he was a painter

and he painted these wonderful cycles on Homer's Iliad

and other historical scenes.

But as he lived in Rome, he fell into the antiquarian culture

and he got interested in collecting and in digging, in finding

and then selling ancient sculpture.

Is that what he was doing, just kind of looting the statues, or was he...?

Well, from our perspective today, we would say he was a treasure hunter.

We say that when you do archaeology, it's not to be

looking for treasure, you're looking for knowledge.

And he wasn't looking for knowledge, he was looking for statues.

And is that one of the chief reasons that people are congregating in Rome?

It is. We have a number of artists in Rome,

Allan Ramsay, for example,

who also in his own way was interested not only in painting

but in antiquities and going out to the countryside

and studying those antiquities.

But he did that in a very different spirit.

When he went out to the countryside and the hinterland around Rome

on repeated occasions during his many visits to Italy

and many years he lived in Italy, he had one obsession, one place he

kept going back to from almost his earliest visit,

-and that was Horace's Villa.

-But why Horace's Villa?

Ramsay thought that there was an intimate connection between artistic

expression and the environment inspiring that expression.

And he thought if he could only find the true site of Horace's

country farm, that he would find it equally inspirational.

'The Roman poet left only a few tantalising

'clues as to the location of his humble farm.'

THUNDER RUMBLES

'But it was enough to inspire Ramsay to spend years scouring

'the Sabine Hills...'

THUNDER RUMBLES

'..this child of the Enlightenment,

'friend to the greatest thinkers of his age, a painter of kings...

'..searching for Arcadia.'

'And he found it.'

Unlike Gavin Hamilton,

Ramsay wasn't searching for an imperial palace full of riches.

No, he was hunting down something much more modest,

the farmhouse of a great classical poet.

And he reveals to us that the real treasure isn't what you dig up

out of the ground, it's how you lead your life.

And he chose to lead his life without being hemmed in by the narrow

boundaries of geography, faith or language.

He wanted to be out there on a European stage, chasing

the ideas and the ideals upon which our civilisation has been built.

THUNDER RUMBLES

'There is not much to see amongst the ruins,

'but even under the rain this place has an aura, a timelessness,

'something of what captured the imaginations of both Ramsay

'and Hamilton.'

For these countrymen, the architectural

remains of the classical age were more than just relics.

They were a blueprint upon which you could build the future.

And a third Scot was going to turn that blueprint into a reality.

'Robert Adam was born in Edinburgh to wealth, privilege and tradition,

'the son of an architect.

'His father trained him in the family business.

'But it would be his time in Italy

'that would exert the greatest influence.

'Rome, of course, offered spectacular architectural inspiration.

'But like both Ramsay and Hamilton,

'he also ventured out beyond the city walls...

'..and into the Italian countryside.

'Here, along the Appian Way,

'he would encounter ancient mausoleums lining the route...

'..Roman ruins bathed in golden light.'

You shouldn't see these Scots in Italy in isolation,

because Robert Adam,

who liked to sign off his letters as "Bob the Roman",

would have known Allan Ramsay, who he described as "Old Mumpy",

and together they drew side by side in the Colosseum, for example.

And I can just imagine them chatting away, saying,

"Oh, you've got that beautifully there, Old Mumpy.

"Why don't you capture the light coming up behind the Colosseum?

"Isn't it fantastic to be here in Italy?"

And every day, as they sketched and drew

and talked to one another about the experiences they were having,

their sense of what the classical age could do for their own work

would have increased.

'It is hard to know, really, how Adam felt as he sat

'and sketched here in Italy.

'But we ARE fortunate to know what he sketched...

'..as those early drawings survive, not in Rome but back in London,

'in the Adam Research Library of the Sloane Museum.'

This is wonderful!

This really is a great privilege, because artists are always extremely

sensitive about who they show their sketches and their sketch books.

I know that I am.

I can feel my own enthusiasm

when I first arrived in Italy in these sketches, because they're

not masterpieces but they are honest and they are enthusiastic.

And what's intriguing is that you also find the moments where

Adam has perhaps noticed a little detail,

an architectural fragment that's caught his eye.

In this case, he's given us table legs with the little table on top.

And Robert Adam wasn't just filling time creating all these watercolours.

What he was creating was an extraordinary resource,

a sort of encyclopaedic record of ancient architecture that was going

to fuel the rest of his glittering career once he got to London.

'Wandering about the Sloane Museum, you get

'a flavour of the immense appetite

'for neoclassical souvenirs and relics.

'But it was often displayed within a certain, shall we say,

'clutter.

'Increasingly, aristocratic collectors sought a more appropriate

'architectural setting, and who better than Adam to provide it?

'He rapidly built up a wealthy

'and influential clientele clamouring for his neoclassical designs.

'But to see the Adam style at its most dazzling,

'you have to come to Syon House,

'not to marvel at the exterior architecture,

'in which Adam had no hand, but to experience its interior.'

So, this is one of the very first distillations of the Adam style.

It's a very important interior.

It really sort of sets the scene for what Adam's trying to

do in the rest of his career.

Although he's obviously stealing very clear reference points

from Italy, this is a grand room, but it doesn't feel like it's pastiche.

It doesn't feel over the top or just a kind of fakery.

It's original, still.

I think what was perhaps most important about what Adam is

doing, as you say,

he's not copying ancient Rome or even elements from ancient Greece.

He's combining the discoveries he and others have made with

contemporary Italy, contemporary France,

with traditional classicism in England and making

a wonderful fusion that really suits the times and suits his patrons.

It's all very new and very exciting

and at the same time also calming.

I mean, all the colours are deliberately muted.

It's very much an architectural palate cleanser

before the glories to come.

-Look at this.

-Wonderful!

What a transformation!

You were supposed to take a great intake of breath and go,

"Oh, my goodness!"

But you're probably also meant to burst out with some glee,

some laughter, because it's theatrical, exciting.

It is about theatre, you're right. And again, it's about fun.

And fun's always had a rather varied reception in Britain.

Later generations castigate him for enjoying himself too much.

Well, what's wrong with that?

If it creates such marvellous interiors as this, I think

it's to be applauded rather than reviled.

'But don't confuse wit for levity.

'Make no mistake, Adam took his work VERY seriously.

'He not only chose where the furniture went

'but designed every piece.

'Such attention to his "brand" saw him become the dominant architect

'not just in Britain or in Europe but on the world stage.'

I'm desperate to try and draw some of Adam's splendour,

but I just don't know where to start. There's so much of it.

And it makes you think, what would John Knox have thought of all

this very un-Presbyterian outburst of glee?

I mean, Adam has taken ancient Rome as his template,

but he's made it his own.

I mean, here you've got the Pantheon, the Arch of Titus,

you've got the Palace of the Domus Aurelius.

Nero himself would have felt at home.

'With all this sumptuous opulence, it may surprise you to hear that,

'for me, his most affecting work is not about grandeur

'but restraint.

'Here, in Calton Hill cemetery in Edinburgh, Adam was

'commissioned to design the mausoleum for the philosopher David Hume.

'And to commemorate this great man of letters,

'Adam didn't dream up an ostentatious memorial.

'Instead, he designed a simple cylinder.'

It does look like the kind of funerary monument that you

might find on the Appian Way.

And I know you think this looks unremarkable, but, for me,

it's an idea that's been realised in stone.

It represent the clarity and the precision of David Hume's writing.

But it's also full of passion and sensory intensity.

It seems so unprepossessing, but you've got to go inside.

GATE CREAKS

And I've learnt my lesson this time, because when you look upwards,

it's not frescoes that you see,

it's the sky!

I mean, Adam was the great interior stylist to the stars.

He designed living rooms and dining saloons for oligarchs.

But he wasn't just about froth.

And when you're in here, you feel the things that were important to people

like Ramsay and Hume, that you should believe only in what you can see...

..you should find beauty in simple truth.

This is not just a tomb.

It's Robert Adam's altar to empiricism,

an altar to the Enlightenment.

GATE CREAKS OPEN

'You also get the sense that this might have been what Ramsay

'was searching for at Horace's Villa,

'a place of quiet contemplation,

'even here in the bustle of Edinburgh.'

VEHICLE HORNS BLARE

'While you can choose to ignore the noise,

'it's very difficult to block out another iconic feature

'of Edinburgh's skyline...

'..another structure dedicated to

'the power of the word in Scottish culture.

'But the Scott Monument is far from understatement...

'..a metaphor for all the twists, flourishes

'and melodrama that characterise Walter Scott's writing.

'He brought romanticism to Scotland,

'with bestselling tales of warriors, princes and heroes.

'These two structures provide a compelling

'symbol of the opposing forces that were set to dominate Scottish art...

'reason on the one side and romance on the other.'

How convenient.

But it's too convenient.

What I see when I look out over this magnificent cityscape,

it's not order, but it's something

much more provocative, much more dynamic.

This wasn't a period that heralded a neat

division between the artists of the Enlightenment,

who dealt in truth, and that new generation who were more

interested in the mystery and the magic of romanticism.

These weren't just forces that raged between artists,

but they could coexist simultaneously within them,

sometimes to stunning effect, and there was one artist who

encapsulated this better than any other.

'Henry Raeburn, like Ramsay 20 years before him,

'spent time in Italy and embarked on a career as a portrait artist.

'But there the similarities end.

'While Ramsay had decided to take London by storm,

'Raeburn chose instead to conquer the Scottish art

'establishment from his studio right here in Edinburgh.'

Raeburn's ghost comes pouring at me through these enormous windows,

because this was the view that Raeburn would have contemplated

every morning.

Ironically, one of the first things that he would have done is to

obscure it by extracting a whole complex series of shutters

and blinds in order to create an atmosphere in which drama

and contrast could really thrive,

because that's what mattered to him in his paintings.

And by changing the lighting effects on his subject, he could really

maximise the brooding intensity of the painting he was about to create.

'On Raeburn's canvases, his subjects were cast in a romantic light...

'..most appropriately in his portraits of Sir Walter Scott,

'depicted here like a hero straight from one of his novels.

'But there is one painting that I'm drawn to above all others,

'a work I first encountered as a young and impressionable boy,

'the most unapologetically iconic portrait in Scottish history.'

The MacNab.

This is one of the images that inspired me to paint as a child.

My father would often give me tasks.

He'd give me images to draw and learn from, and he knew that this

kind of dramatic icon would excite my imagination.

It's got swords, it's got drama, it's got clouds,

it's got an incredible Highland chieftain.

And even as a child, it wasn't just the theatricality of the subject

that got me, it was the theatrical way that Raeburn used the paint.

His whole approach to the canvas was instinctive.

Raeburn wouldn't fret, he wouldn't overanalyse.

Apparently, he'd actually run at the canvas from across the studio.

You've got to love the guy!

'Despite the swagger, Raeburn was as committed to Enlightenment

'principles as his predecessor, Allan Ramsay.

'In his paintings of key intellectual figures of the day, he observes

'and reveals the individual characters

'that lie behind their reputations.

'And if you look closely at The MacNab,

'the swashbuckling bravado begins to give up a few secrets.'

In actual fact, when this image was completed,

the mighty MacNab was notorious as a drunkard, a womaniser who'd fathered

32 children and had gambled away the MacNab family fortune and estate.

And when you gaze into his eyes, you find the manic look

of a sozzled charlatan on the brink of being exposed.

And in the fleeting passage of Raeburn's oh, so brutal

brushstrokes, he pins him down.

'Raeburn's portraits captured a world of privilege with bravura

'and brilliance.

'But ultimately,

'this was hardly representative of the lives most people endured.

'It would take a more precise brush

'to paint Scotland with a common touch.'

David Wilkie was born the son of a minister

in the parish of Cults in Fife.

His early paintings were rooted in the customs

and the provincial habits of village life and he had the habit

of visiting local fairs and markets to sketch the people around him.

Like Wilkie, I go out and sketch all the time

and it's great to train your hand to almost draw automatically,

for your eyes to be looking at the subject and your hands

just tracing the movement because you're not thinking too hard,

you're just recording exactly what is happening in front of your eyes.

And Wilkie, the precocious young 19-year-old,

when he took all those sketches back to his studio

and created his finished paintings, he would present

life in a rural community as a kind of soap opera -

a world of daily humour, tribulations

and the occasional urinating dog.

It might not look like social documentary to you,

but to an audience unused to seeing the humble British peasant

immortalised on canvas, this was vicariously thrilling.

And yet, Wilkie would be increasingly unsettled that his audience

loved the humour but seemed to ignore his implicit message

that everyone was worthy of dignity and respect.

So in 1815, he decided to abandon his Scottish provincial work

and focus on a very serious English crisis

provoked by a change in English law.

Distraining For Rent shows

a ruined tenant farmer confronted by bailiffs.

They are here to seize his possessions and his dignity.

This image packed a real documentary punch

when it was first revealed.

And the usual landed ladies and gentry, who would turn to Wilkie

for a jolly point of conversation, were caught a bit short.

I mean, an image that seemed to attack the morality

of the nation's landlords, that was bad form.

In this painting, there is no clear reason for the catastrophe,

there's no sense that this man is a drunkard or that he is lazy.

This man and his family just appeared to be victims.

For Wilkie, what was also important is that it's a domestic epic.

If you look at all these characters,

they are arranged across the stage in one line, like a classical frieze.

If you dressed them up in togas, you could be forgiven for mistaking

this for a painting by Gavin Hamilton.

Increasingly, that's what came to intrigue Wilkie -

how to give ordinary life the same consideration as you might

a grand history painting.

Wilkie's focus upon an English scene brought him the appreciation

and understanding that he craved.

And saw him become the toast of London society.

But this only highlighted a persistent anxiety

for Scottish artists, how to work within the Union

without your own sense of nationality being overwhelmed.

Restless with his artistic identity,

Wilkie accepted a commission from the Duke of Wellington himself,

which he hoped would bring some resolution.

This was going to be another bustling street scene,

but the key players in this performance weren't going

to be rustic peasants, they were going to be war veterans.

Wilkie found himself coming down to sketch on the streets of Chelsea.

Over the next six years,

he would set to work on his most ambitious subject matter -

war.

Chelsea Pensioners Reading The Waterloo Dispatch

isn't a provincial scene, it is

a coming together of multiple identities. It's the celebration

of a national achievement,

not English, not Scottish, but British.

But reconciling Wilkie's ambition to be a British painter

of modern history with the public's perception of him,

as a Scots illustrator of provincial comedies,

was going to be a battle he could never win.

Artists are by nature sensitive people

and he endured huge mental turmoil.

And only two years

after completing this painting, he had a nervous breakdown.

It would not, however, be the end of Wilkie.

As part of his recovery, he headed to the Continent.

Some years after Raeburn and Ramsay,

but it would have just the same transformative effect upon his art.

To see this, I'm sadly not returning to Rome but to the dark stores

of the National Galleries in an unassuming suburb of Edinburgh.

We began with the word, with the Word of God and the words of John Knox.

And after almost 300 years, we're back with John Knox

and his verbals all over again.

Now Wilkie had already shown that paintings have the power

to provoke, the power to inspire.

Even ones as small as this.

It must have been no small irony to him that in the 19th century,

the son of a Presbyterian minister was free to be an artist,

free to depict John Knox, that very nemesis of all creativity,

mid-rant in a hugely theatrical painting.

When I first saw this, I thought,

"There can be few images that can depict a moment upon which

"so much hinged in the history of Scottish art."

That was until I saw this.

What's extraordinary about this enormous canvas is that Wilkie

has placed John Knox standing at the centre of this huge

unfinished composition as if he were Jesus Christ himself

presiding over The Last Supper. You get the feeling

that Wilkie, having travelled all across Europe

and been exposed to the most wonderful treasures of Catholic art,

has come back to Britain determined to create

an equally confident future for the art of his Protestant homeland.

You feel that Wilkie is painting out his own credo,

his own artistic faith because he wouldn't be told how

to paint by anyone, not the critics,

not the visitors at the Royal Academy.

"I will do it my own way, thank you very much, Mr Knox."

Wilkie epitomises just how far we have come.

Scottish artists had stepped confidently out of the shadows

and now were feted at the Royal Academy and favoured by kings.

However, the nation was still struggling

to assert its identity within the Union.

It would not be paintings of the privileged few

or ordinary folk that would offer a resolution.

It would be the landscape itself.

Scottish landscape painting had its origins in interior decoration

in the works of men like James Norie

who ran a family business

ornamenting grand country houses with painted parodies

of the Italian campagna.

The concepts of moral, spiritual and civic order were vital

to the Enlightenment and they had found expression

in the ideal landscape.

Safe, picturesque, not a loch or a glen to be seen.

I love to paint landscapes,

but there's always a moment when the subject reveals its ability

to intimidate and threaten.

The implicit untamed savagery of the Scottish wilderness

had repelled the classical mindset,

but increasingly the notion that the landscape could represent

something dangerous,

uncontrolled and sublime appealed to the 19th-century imagination.

And one imagination in particular.

Queen Victoria's fascination with the romance of Scotland was first

aroused by the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

And after visiting the Highlands in 1842, she was besotted.

Where the Queen led, the masses followed.

Scotland's glens were soon flooded with tourists

and landlords were swift to displace the local population

to make way for their Highland fantasies.

Captured here by the Queen's favourite artist, Edwin Landseer.

Landseer was a Londoner by birth, but established a reputation

for capturing the stirring majesty of the Scottish landscape.

And the cult of the Highlands is encapsulated by one

painting of his in particular.

Excuse me, can you tell me where I'll find the Monarch of the Glen?

This painting is not to be found in the royal collection,

or a gallery, but a museum.

Although it is proving a little tough to find. Even here.

Victorian artists always used to worry about where their work

would be positioned at the Royal Academy.

Would they be hung in a side gallery,

or maybe above a doorway into a refreshment room?

It was a way that the institution had of signalling that, although the work

was accepted into the exhibition, it was perhaps not quite up to standard.

So, where do I find one of the most iconic pieces of Scottish art,

but above a doorway at the end of a corridor?

An awkward member of the family.

Does it look familiar?

This image has spawned countless imitations,

prints and engravings, advertisements, whisky labels,

beer mats, biscuit tins, and as if ubiquity wasn't crime enough,

any footnote to this painting will tell you that

the stag and stag hunting were key culprits

in the tragedy of the Highland Clearances.

It's symbolic of a culture that prioritises rich men's sports

over poor men's lives.

We feel so guilty about this painting.

People absolutely loathe it.

But, when I look at the Monarch of the Glen, what do I see?

I see a brilliantly executed painting.

I see a wonderful piece of Victoriana, a blockbuster,

the kind of instantly recognisable imagery that any other country

in the world would just kill for.

Many people interpret this image as an example of cultural colonialism.

A myth imposed by an Englishman

intended to obscure a more authentic national identity.

But we're not the victims here.

Scots have always been complicit in exploiting a selective

kind of imagery, of heroism, of grandeur, and one of the most

dramatic landscape painters of the age was, in fact, a native.

It's easy to sneer at Horatio McCulloch.

He didn't travel to Italy to commune with our ancient, classical heritage.

He began, like so many Scottish landscape painters, as a decorator.

He started out painting snuff boxes and tea caddies.

Examples of his handiwork are rare.

Look at that. Glowing.

When I say to you "tea chest", or "tea caddy",

you probably just think it's a piece of ornament - nothing really

to threaten the English Breakfast, but this is a treasure chest.

And although there is all the stuff of classical lyricism in here,

a gilded land of fantasy,

already Horatio McCulloch is pushing at the borders of his frame.

And he's created something in which there is a menace in these woods.

There's a glowering sense of romanticism.

And therein lies the hint that this man is going to become

the purveyor of enormous Highland landscapes.

McCulloch didn't stick to painting tea caddies for long.

Instead, he headed out into the big country.

And this particular painting has proved

so popular that it's been on public view virtually without interruption

since the day that it was purchased by Glasgow Municipal Council in 1901.

Glencoe still is Scotland's Monument Valley.

This place and this painting are the very essence of romanticism.

Sometimes McCulloch's paintings can feel a bit neat in reproduction

but, when you meet them in the flesh, you realise that the canvas is

covered in texture and expressive, gestural brushstrokes.

McCulloch was a harum-scarum kind of character.

He was a real Boy's Own Adventure type, and the way that he

treats the paint reveals the thrill he gets from the subject.

McCulloch's reputation has become as mythical as his paintings.

A legendary figure trekking up the mountains,

doggedly battling the elements

to capture the awesome power of the surroundings.

But the mythology that surrounds McCulloch means

that getting to the truth about him is equally problematic.

Because he didn't scale these precipices with a canvas

on his back, in order to create his magnificent paintings.

They were, for the most part, completed entirely in his studio.

But what he did do was that,

during annual summer painting trips in Scotland,

he would come to such points and he would create the most exquisite,

intuitive and expressive studies of the landscape.

And when you're confronted by this mighty subject matter,

you realise that McCulloch wasn't making it up.

Scotland gives you this.

McCulloch's work has often been regarded as overblown or

fraudulent and yet, standing here, it appears almost photorealistic.

And it finds an echo in the work of contemporary photographer

David Eustace.

Who, like McCulloch 200 years before him,

has found rich inspiration in the Highlands.

What do you find particularly difficult

about photographing the Highlands?

The one thing you can't do is, you can't compete with nature.

You come here. We're looking at this, it's stunning.

And I go, "OK, I'm going to make a photograph of this."

So you make it 5' x 4', and you go, "That's OK."

But, for me, when I made the Highland Heart portfolio,

what I wanted to get from the landscape here

was the vastness of this, was this,

but what I took from it was a delicacy.

So, from now on, I will possibly make a lot smaller prints.

-And I think that's important.

-That's actually the truth.

It actually prefer McCulloch's sketches of the landscape

to his large portraits. And they're only so big.

And he manages to condense that power into a delicate format.

-It makes you want to look into it.

-Yes.

That, to me, is how my mind's going which is maybe just coincidental

again, but I love that idea of this delicacy, this fragility,

that you go, "I'm going to actually be lost in this."

McCulloch was a pioneer,

working on these small sketches directly from his subject, he managed

to create paintings that captured the majesty of this landscape.

But, in his larger canvases, there remains one element that is

conspicuously and consistently absent -

people.

The uneasy shadow of the Highland Clearances has led many

contemporary eyes to view McCulloch's grand style with suspicion.

But that's what Highlandism does.

It subjects Scotland to the drama filter.

It suppresses all signs of modernity and it simply wipes out the people.

And, in the place of individuals,

it's the landscape itself that seems to become a person...

..projecting human attributes of honour, dignity

and endurance.

Horatio McCulloch is remembered today as a painter

of the romantic fantasy and yet, his sketches reveal

that his work was entirely grounded in direct observation.

McCulloch embodies the tensions

and contradictions that we have encountered time and time again.

This was a period when artists from Scotland travelled all across

the continent in order to encounter the wonders of European art history.

And it's almost as if all that travelling, all that studying,

was about bringing us to this point,

when an artist could be born in Scotland,

when he could study in Scotland

and he could spend his career creating paintings

that rooted the Scottish identity in the wonders of our landscape.

And these were the paintings that cemented a powerful and enduring

image of Scotland in the imagination of the world.

However, as the 19th century drew to a close,

majestic landscapes seemed unbecoming of an emerging industrial nation.

Artists from Scotland would reject the principles of romanticism

and embrace a whole new way of painting.