Episode 3 The Story of Scottish Art

On a blustery day in 1883,

Scotland's most eminent landscape painter stood,

watching the tide turning off the west coast.

William McTaggart had captured these views many times before.

But on this occasion, he began to envisage

a very different kind of canvas.

I've painted seascapes on the west coast of Scotland all my life,

and I can just imagine, as the sky darkens

and the wind begins to get up,

how McTaggart becomes more and more excited.

Alone on the beach, surrounded by the elements,

he conjures up a new image of Scotland,

the image of a nation standing on the brink of enormous change.

McTaggart called his painting The Storm.

It captured not just the beauty but the restlessness,

the vulnerability and the troubled spirit of Scotland.

This was a time when a new generation

of Scottish artists emerged,

who rejected tradition.

They were bohemian, they were rebellious

and they were in search of a new way of seeing,

a new way of creating art that would reflect the modern age.

The last decades of the 19th century were a tempestuous period

in the history of Scottish art.

A time when the dual forces of tradition

and reinvention wrestled for artistic supremacy.

Scotland's artists, refusing to be shackled by their past,

travelled far and wide in search of inspiration...

..and dazzled us with a riot of colour, movement and light.

Over four blistering decades,

they would forge a modern art for a modern Scotland.

An art that would challenge history.

An art that would question conventions.

An art that would burn fast and fearsome

before it was consumed in the fire of the First World War.

Glasgow. In the 1880s, this was the engine room of empire.

A place teeming with life.

An industrial boom town where commercial success

would soon fuel a new artistic awakening.

Glasgow's merchants and industrialists

were self-made men with money to burn.

These tycoons, who'd made their fortunes in the cotton, tobacco

and ship-building trades, well, for them,

collecting art was a new way to launder their identity,

to clean the muck from out under their fingernails.

And because they weren't from aristocratic stock

they didn't have huge inherited collections of art,

so the walls of their spanking new Victorian palazzos

looked decidedly blank.

It was a very good time to be an artist in Scotland.

It was against this backdrop

that a dynamic group of Glasgow-based artists emerged,

keen to breathe new life into Scottish art.

This loose-knit band of kindred spirits

would become known as the Glasgow Boys.

You can see some of the key players here,

decked out as great Masters of the past

at the Glasgow Art Club's costume ball.

A sign, perhaps, of their self-confidence and intent.

But proposing new ways of painting in Scotland

was going to be a hard sell.

This was the highly popular,

and officially sanctioned, image of Scotland

that the Glasgow Boys were up against.

These kind of Highland panoramas

had become a globally recognised trademark.

Think Scotland, think the big country, the rutting wildlife,

and a veil of mist, turned tobacco colour

by layers of gloopy varnish.

So why change such a winning formula?

Well, the point was that, on the Continent,

artists had begun to move away from this kind of bombastic romanticism,

they were less interested in making a monument out of the landscape

and more intrigued by a sense of spontaneity, intimacy,

a dancing glance of sunlight.

The art of Scotland was beginning to look a little bit out of date,

old-fashioned. Artists were going to need to change with the times.

The young James Guthrie would emerge as one of the pioneers

of the Glasgow group.

He was determined that their paintings would capture

an authentic Scotland, its landscape,

its people, its light.

Guthrie struck out into the rolling lowlands in search of inspiration.

He wasn't after dramatic views,

he sought out intimate scenes,

the mundane reality of everyday rural life.

In its day, painting an objective, unsentimental portrait

of a rustic labourer was seen as radical.

Giving a farmer the air of dignity,

making a painting of him that showed the respect and commitment

that you might when doing a portrait of a king or an aristocrat.

Well, in Britain at least, that was still seen

as a concept as controversial as today's pickled shark.

It was a challenge to convention.

To genuinely reflect rural reality,

Guthrie embedded himself within a village community.

A very progressive thing for a British artist to do at the time.

During the 1880s,

Cockburnspath on the Berwickshire coast became his home from home.

Other members of the Glasgow group joined him during the summer months.

The unsuspecting village soon became a lively artist's colony,

with an artist lodger in almost every house.

In painting after painting, the boys immortalise the villagers on canvas.

Theirs is the Scottish landscape through a portrait lens,

rather than a wide-angle.

And this unposed authenticity could only be achieved

by getting out of the studio and sketching outdoors, from life.

The Boys' enthusiasm for plein air painting coincided with

new technological developments.

Small tubes of paint and collapsible easels made working outside

more practical than it had ever been before.

Allowing the Boys to carefully emulate

the cool tones of the elusive Scottish sunshine.

There's a great pleasure in painting outdoors because

when you're no longer in the studio,

you get affected by lots of other things

that are happening around you so...

this evening the light is... is changing all the time.

It's very soft but there are little, little moments

where it comes through the cloud

and it highlights parts of the landscape.

You can't imagine any of that.

You can't imagine the changes

that come across the landscape so suddenly.

Painting outdoors was already popular in France.

But, as Guthrie's sketch shows,

in the changeable Scottish weather it demanded considerable dedication.

When winter set in and the other Glasgow Boys returned to the warmth

of their city studios, Guthrie doggedly stayed on in Cockburnspath.

One year he really struggled with a depiction of fieldworkers

sheltering from the rain and he got so frustrated

with this composition that he put his foot right through the canvas.

But he persevered, he pushed through it.

And, you know, painting's not always a picnic,

to get to the best paintings you've got to fight for them.

He certainly understood that.

Guthrie and the Glasgow Boys were turning their back

on many of the conventions in Scottish art.

This boldness was one of the reasons Sandy Moffat was drawn to

their work as a young student artist.

For him, they set the benchmark

against which his generation measured themselves.

Sometimes when you look at these paintings from a 21st century

point of view they really,

they don't look that radical - but they were.

It's a complete break from everything the Victorians preached,

in a sense, as good art.

The Boys broke with that totally.

It was a kind of gesture towards

a more open and democratic way of painting.

They're saying, "We're not snooty people, you know,

"hovering around the Royal Academy at that stage,

"we're saying we're identifying with farm labourers,

"we're identifying with a completely different way of,

"with a different strata in society."

What do you think that, for example, an artist like Guthrie,

coming here to the landscape of south-eastern Scotland,

what did he want to say by being here?

Well, it seems that he definitely wanted to say something about

Scotland and the way that the rural communities existed and worked.

For Guthrie, the subject matter

and the way of painting that subject matter went hand-in-hand.

Here, it's about testing out these ideas

you have of what paint might do,

applied in this way to this particular subject.

The fact he did that changes the whole course of Scottish painting,

literally overnight.

While the Royal Academy in London celebrated titillating pastiches

of classical mythology,

James Guthrie was painting life as he found it,

and wiping the dirt of the real world from his boots.

It was during one of these hikes that Guthrie stumbled across

a young farm worker harvesting cabbages.

It's the moment when, for me,

one of the greatest paintings by any of the Glasgow Boys was conceived.

This is no romanticised image

or stock character from central casting.

Guthrie captures a dignity and an intensity

that resonates across the centuries.

No matter how many times I encounter the Hind's Daughter,

I always find that it's such an immediate and compelling image

that it feels like the first encounter ever.

You never look as closely at a painting

as you do when you're sketching from it.

It's not about copying,

it's about immersing yourself in the artist's technique.

It's an extraordinary feat of painting,

and you can see across this whole canvas,

Guthrie exploiting some of those important Glasgow Boys'

stylistic signatures, particularly his use of a square-headed brush,

he's applying the paint in broad strokes,

he's often emphasising it with a palette knife,

which gives the whole image a real thickness

because it's been worked on layer upon layer.

And yet, with the face of this young girl, he's changed styles,

his painted it smoothly, cleanly and subtly,

so that her presence emerges out of all this heavily laden brushwork

and it meets you with an extraordinarily personal effect.

This is totally unsentimental.

You really get the sense that you are encountering life

as it was face-to-face.

The Hind's Daughter was a powerful new kind of Scottish painting,

one that reflected the growing influence of continental ideas.

In France, painters like Jules Bastien-Lepage

had achieved celebrity

by capturing rural life with an almost photographic realism.

So, while Guthrie remained in Scotland,

another section of the Glasgow group travelled across the Channel,

hoping to uncover the secrets of

this new naturalistic style at its source.

The leader of the pack was John Lavery,

who discovered his talent for painting while working

as a retoucher in a Glasgow photographer's studio.

When Lavery arrived in Grez-sur-Loing,

a sleepy village 50 miles south of Paris,

he stepped into an international artists' colony,

full of bohemian types, desperate to get their taste of Lepage country.

The locals must have eyed them sagely.

"They won't last long", they'd have thought.

And many of them didn't.

After their summer of rustic fun, most of them returned home

where parents, kindly but firmly, told them to get a proper job!

But Lavery was here to take it seriously.

He set up his easel on the river bank

and began a work that would make his name at home and abroad.

Although some of the scenery does feel a bit familiar,

maybe you'd stumble across something like this near Cockburnspath.

For Lavery, the light, the smells, the sound of those

French voices across the river would have felt still very exotic.

And it drove him, I think, to take some chances, to create some

new paintings that he perhaps

would never have been moved to do in Scotland.

PIANO MUSIC

Here, in Grez, Lavery's painting would be transformed.

Touched by French Impressionism,

he developed a broader, looser style.

And, like a roving reporter, he was also experimenting with

daring photographic composition and depth of field.

The bridge at Grez was a popular subject.

It had been painted numerous times before.

But no-one would capture it quite like Lavery.

Perhaps he was inspired by a chance encounter with his hero,

Bastien-Lepage, who'd bestowed

a few words of advice.

"Select a person", said Lepage sagely.

"Watch him and then note down everything you can remember.

"Never look twice."

Lavery took his words to heart.

His is a scene caught in the blink of an eye on a lazy afternoon.

A rower blows a kiss to his sweetheart

and slips by in a shimmer of heat.

There for a fleeting moment and then gone.

It was like nothing Lavery had ever painted before.

France had stretched Lavery, introduced him

to new ways of looking at life and capturing it on canvas.

And when, after two formative summers, Lavery returned

to Scotland, the taste of France lingered on in his painting.

Lavery was determined to announce his return

to the Scottish arts scene with a bit of a fanfare.

He began a series of studies for what he hoped would be a dynamic

new canvas inspired by the newly-invented sport of lawn tennis.

Lavery was always a bit of an artist entrepreneur

and he had a hunch that all those wealthy Scottish collectors

with their fat wallets would be more seduced, more lured, into buying

paintings of themselves at play

than any number of mud-spattered peasants.

Lavery was taking on a very modern theme,

the middle-class at play, and working it up on a scale

normally reserved for weighty, historical subjects.

It was a bold move.

But Lavery was playing a clever game.

The Tennis Party is a seductive painting.

It invites you to walk through the open gate and join the company.

And who wouldn't want to be introduced into this world?

A place gilded in sunlight, blessed with ease.

The Tennis Party would become the quintessential image

of late 19th-century middle-class Scottish life

and it made Lavery's name as a society painter.

The mid-1880s marked a coming of age, not just for Lavery,

but the whole Glasgow group.

And it coincided with a high point for the city, too.

During the International Exhibition of 1888,

the world came to Glasgow, which was now hailed as a great centre of art.

The Boys' work was showcased to an international audience.

They were being talked about.

They secured group shows in Europe and America.

They had arrived!

Scottish art had been forced to take along, hard look at itself.

at the people it chose to depict,

and the landscape it chose to identify with.

The Glasgow Boys were only gentle radicals, but there was one artist

on the fringes of the group whose ambition reached even further.

He is, in my view, one of the great unsung heroes of Scottish art.

His name is Arthur Melville.

Melville was an artist buccaneer.

A man who took as many risks in his paintings

as he did on his far-flung adventures.

MUSIC: The Seven Seas by Richard Harvey

In the 1880s, he embarked on a treacherous two-year voyage

across the Middle East,

taking in Cairo, Karachi and Baghdad.

Melville thought that he was journeying into the Arabian nights,

but, in actual fact, he found his own heart of darkness.

On his journey, he was pursued by bandits,

robbed and even arrested as a spy.

But the greatest adventure of his life lay in exploring the magic

and wonder of watercolour.

MUSIC: Waterfalls by Dominic Johnson

During his travels, Melville developed a unique style

that the critics called "blottesque".

No other Victorian watercolourist could rival the simple,

almost abstract power of these paintings.

In the dazzling light of the Mediterranean,

Melville perfected the challenging wet-on-wet technique,

which means using wet paint on wet paper.

It's difficult because you have to work very fast and instinctively.

Most amateur watercolour artists always try

and keep control of their image.

They work with very small brushes and they try

and keep the whole image dry because once you've lost control

of watercolour painting, that's it, it's gone.

You have to start again. Melville, however, was very brave.

He would use big, thick brushes, loaded with water and pigment

and he would splash them across the page from a very early point.

Now, watercolour images increasingly become more detailed,

but Melville wasn't really pursuing precision.

He wanted to capture light, atmosphere, mood.

He'd often soak the whole page in water so that

when he touched the surface of it with his brush

the pigment would be absorbed in a huge cloud of fresh colour.

It's like when you drop a spot of ink onto blotting paper.

He then might attack the page with a sponge

and he'd pull off some of the colour, using it like an eraser,

and when all of that had died down, dried down, he'd only then begin

to introduce the essential elements of detail with a darker colour.

The results were mind-blowing.

Strong, vibrant, sensual, exciting.

This was a new kind of Scottish art, pushing watercolour to its limits.

ACCORDION PLAYS

But what I find most astounding is the direction that Melville

took his art in Paris in 1889.

Paris was the 19th-century world capital of art.

Nowhere else compared.

And this was the year of the Exposition Universelle,

a once-in-a-decade opportunity to see the very best contemporary art.

In a series of quite spectacular exhibitions, Melville was treated to

a roll call of everyone

who was anyone in the contemporary art world.

Monet, Cezanne, Rodin, Paul Serusier, Emile Bernard,

Paul Gaugin,

all exhibiting in the same place at the same time.

Surely that could not fail to impress?

This was painting that wasn't about realism any more.

In fact, it was about the very opposite.

It was about making the world around you appear a little bit unreal.

Heady with this intoxicating display of revolutionary art,

Melville headed for the newly-opened Moulin Rouge,

the hottest nightspot in town.

It would be a revelation.

APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING

During the show, Melville did not stop sketching.

His hand danced across the page, but the images that emerged

seemed completely unrelated to the performance.

They were unreal.

Surreal.

Melville was unleashing colour in a new and boldly thrilling way.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

For me, Melville's Moulin Rouge studies are some of the most

exciting gems ever produced by a Scottish artist.

These are pages from Melville's sketchbook

and here you've got a whole procession of cancan girls which,

if you look at it right,

you can see emerging out of the whole puddle of watercolour.

And he hasn't tried to describe it precisely,

he's simply let the dribbles of his paint define the standing legs

of the girls which allow you,

through all this maelstrom of brushwork,

to imagine the other legs kicking up in the air.

There's even the hand splodged down at the bottom left-hand corner

of one of the onlookers shrieking with delight.

So, in these watercolours, we've got Melville,

an artist of the 19th century,

who isn't dictating to us what we're seeing.

He's allowing your imagination to run riot.

That's expressed most particularly in this other watercolour, I think.

Who knows what's happening here?

And if you spin the page round and round,

it doesn't make any more sense.

But what I can see is that, as he's been slapping on these

fantastic, pure colours onto the paper, he's been holding the page up

one way first so that the paint dribbles down the edge.

He has then decided to hold the page another way as he's explored

this yellow tone and the paint has dribbled this way.

Then he's applied onto an increasingly wet piece of paper,

another tone and he's dribbled this fantastic ultramarine blue

down the middle.

You can see where the paint has been so wet,

it's mixed together into the green.

He is turning the page round and round

and you can hear the swirling cancan in the background.

Melville was an artist ahead of his time.

His premature death from typhoid fever aged just 49

cut short a brilliant career.

Who knows what he could have gone on to achieve.

While Melville's art was steeped in adventure and exoticism,

one of the most successful artists of this generation remained

resolutely at home,

capturing his native land with an empathy

and understanding that remains unrivalled.

William McTaggart was a man apart.

He was born into a Gaelic-speaking fishing community

in Kintyre on Scotland's remote west coast.

His singular vision for Scottish art

was inspired by the landscape of his childhood.

One shaped by the constant exchange

between rugged shore and raging tide.

William McTaggart had grown up surrounded by fishermen

so he really understood the rhythms of the sea.

He understood its power to sustain life, but also to take it away,

because his own son had died in a fishing accident aged only 21.

So, when McTaggart paints such places, he's actually describing

a landscape that he has been immersed in all of his life.

He's portraying his own people.

MUSIC: Distant Lands by Richard Harvey

McTaggart once said, "It's the heart that's the thing."

His painting is driven by emotion...

..a passion for spontaneous brushwork

and the profound affection for his subject.

But this landscape was experiencing one of

the greatest upheavals in Scottish history.

The Highland Clearances.

As a boy, William McTaggart had watched hundreds

of homeless Highlanders who'd been turfed off their land

in order to make way for sheep,

queueing on the quayside at Campbeltown.

They were waiting for the ships that were going to take them

to a new life in the Americas.

It was an image William McTaggart would never forget.

The Clearances decimated the Gaelic-speaking population,

threatening the language, culture

and history that McTaggart had inherited.

In the 1890s, the memories he had been harbouring all his life

emerged in a series of highly personal canvasses.

They portrayed the arrival of St Columba in the 6th century,

a pioneer of Gaelic culture in Scotland.

And the sailing of the emigrant ships

that swept waves of Gaelic people

away from their native land.

This is a painting of a Gaelic community.

It's a portrait of that community,

as it's being torn apart and uprooted.

And the very landscape seems to take it personally.

And, what strikes me when I look at these paintings up close,

is that, the reason that, amidst all the swirl of brushstrokes,

it becomes quite hard to discern detail, to pick out the figures,

is because, for McTaggart, the community that lives here

and the identity of the local geography...

they are interchangeable.

They are both implicated in an underlying narrative

of hardship and loss.

What I love, though, about McTaggart's work

is that really it's all about heart.

These images, they breathe, they crash with a kind of tidal energy

that was totally unique in Scottish art at the time.

McTaggart's elegy for a disappearing culture was deeply personal.

But it resonated with the times.

Across Britain, a new era was dawning,

heralded by the sweeping changes of the industrial age.

The Industrial Revolution had turned Scotland from a largely

agricultural nation into one centred around its cities.

Nowhere more so than its engine room, Glasgow.

But a growing artistic movement felt this so-called progress

was destroying the cultural life of the nation.

And it was the artist's job to fight against this.

The Arts and Crafts Movement really believed that art was much more

than just a commodity.

They thought that art should be integrated

into the very fabric of society for the benefit and elevation of all.

One Scottish institution that really embraced

the new Arts and Crafts ethos was the Glasgow School of Art.

The school was a forward-thinking, innovative place

and one of the first in the world

to admit women on the same terms as men.

Margaret MacDonald and her younger sister, Francis, enrolled in 1890.

Two talented and versatile young artists,

they found themselves in just the right place at the right time.

In the school's all-embracing atmosphere,

the sisters developed their distinctive style across

a vast range of mediums from fabric and beaten metal,

to paintings and wall decorations.

While they were at the School of Art, they were introduced to

two like-minded students, Herbert McNair and a 25-year-old architect

who was already standing out from the crowd,

Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

They soon became a close-knit group, known to other students as The Four.

The friends painted together, they partied together.

Francis coupled up with McNair, Margaret with Macintosh.

Their lives became intertwined.

The Four began to devise a haunting new graphic style,

one that was based on fluid, organic forms, sinewy tendrils

and the stylised shapes of flowers, plants, trees and stems.

They would meet in each other's studios

and have discussions long into the night.

From out of their imaginations,

they began to spin a whole new kind of imagery, one which,

rather like them, was intense, intimate,

provocative and sensual.

These young souls were about to press a thorn into the comfortable,

moral and oh-so-tasteful backside of Victorian convention.

When The Four first exhibited together, their elongated designs

and ghoulish figures led critics to dub them The Spook School.

A tension between flowering abundance

and macabre collapse permeates everything they created.

They are examining themes,

allegories of love, purity and chastity.

But not in a celebratory way.

All of the designs and watercolours and drawings that I'm looking at

seem to take that warm, comforting hug of femininity and motherhood

and undermine it,

threaten it with a sense of uncertainty.

We're entering a kind of nether world, a dream landscape

that doesn't seem terribly welcoming.

And, across Europe, there was, at this particular time,

a real trend for a design aesthetic called Art Nouveau

which relied heavily upon motifs of elongated female forms

and slender drawings of flowers and trees.

But what you see when you are confronted by these images is that

they're creating a style that was

distinct and particular to this city.

The look The Four created

and applied to a staggering array of work became known as Glasgow Style.

It was much more than Arts and Crafts with a Celtic twist.

It was a new vision for Scottish art, a fusion of Celtic symbolism,

traditional craft and contemporary design for the modern world.

But it was Charles Rennie Mackintosh who would emerge

as the talismanic figure of the group.

Today, we remember him as an architectural genius.

But, for me, his brilliance lay in the fact

that he would never be restricted to one discipline.

He was an artist who sculpted space

and created environments that immersed you in a total work of art.

And nowhere did Mackintosh achieve

this more fully than at Hill House

in Helensburgh, which he designed

and built in the early 1900s

for the publisher Walter Blackie.

Hill House is striking in its simplicitly.

But when the sun comes out

and the shadows reveal the intricacy of Mackintosh's design, you can

really appreciate the sculptural quality of this building.

It distils Scotland's architectural history into a structure

that feels disarmingly original, unprecedented.

It's frustratingly hard to capture in a sketch.

I've been trying to draw this building

and it's been a real struggle.

-All I've come up with is a sketch of a baronial Scottish castle.

-Yep.

There's nothing wrong with that. I think that's right.

You can see baronial forms here.

You see the gable, you see the tall chimneys,

you see the random fenestration.

These are typical Scottish qualities of vernacular architecture.

When you say "vernacular", what do you mean?

Well, what you mean is that this is an architecture

developed by people in Scotland on Scottish buildings

and it owes very little to classical tradition.

But it's still something ancient, something old-fashioned?

Well, certainly between the 13th century and the 16th century

are the roots of that style, the Scottish baronial style.

It's a very pragmatic style.

It adapts to the site, it adapts to history.

It changes through the centuries. It's not something that is static,

that's got set rules that things must be placed in a certain way.

So, why did Charles Rennie Mackintosh want to make

a 20th-century building look like a 13th century castle?

I think for an artist like Mackintosh,

looking to the past in order to leap forward was very important.

And there are some aspects in

the way of working of the Scottish baronial

which are very congenial to the modernist view of an object.

The idea that the object has its own life,

that you build pragmatically, that you allow the building

to emerge with his own authenticity over a period of time.

So, he's working like an artist or sculptor,

making spontaneous decisions on-site?

Yeah, I think like some others in history.

I don't think it's too much to compare to Leonardo, to Rafaelli.

He's an artist-architect.

Hill House is a bold, modernist statement.

But it's also a very personal and intimate home,

designed down to the smallest detail

with Walter Blackie and his family in mind.

Hill House really does manage to encapsulate all the principles

that Mackintosh held dear.

You've got tradition and reinvention and just a sprinkling of magic.

Who would have believed that behind the facade

that appears to be so austere, like a Scottish fortress,

that on the inside it would be lyrical, magical,

so unshackled by any kind of precedent?

Throughout this building, nature is welcomed inside.

Vertical oak beams suggest an internal woodland

and stencilled motifs creep up the walls like briars.

It's a place of contrasts where light and shade,

colour and restraint combine to guide you

from one room to the next...

..as if you're being led by a character

from one of Blackie's fairy tales.

At Hill House, Mackintosh transforms a family home

into one of Scotland's greatest works of art.

It was also a labour of love.

The creative kinship between Mackintosh and his wife,

Margaret MacDonald, flourished throughout the building.

She created fabrics and wall decorations

to complement his design.

For the visionary architect, his wife was a soul mate.

A steadying influence and a lifelong collaborator.

Mackintosh was besotted with Margaret. But he was also

entranced with her as an artist, and he once said,

"Margaret had genius, I have only talent."

But what is certain is that here at Hill House, genius, talent,

love, lust and wonder tremble together in a genuinely moving

creative union.

Hill House is the moment

when a true Scottish genius blossoms.

Mackintosh is now hailed as one of the pioneers of the Modern Movement.

But at the time, his vision was largely misunderstood

or simply ignored in Scotland.

But his dedication to challenging tradition, to reinvigorating it

and making it new couldn't be silenced.

And soon, another artist would insist that Scottish art

belonged at the very head of the modernist avant-garde.

JD Fergusson was one of a group of painters who succeeded

the Glasgow Boys as the bright young things of Scottish art.

They would become known as the Colourists,

because of their vibrant palette.

Early in his career, Fergusson established a highly saleable style.

But for Ferg, this wasn't enough.

He sensed the revolutionary possibilities of contemporary art.

And there was only one place

that offered the liberation, light and life he craved.

Paris.

Fergusson moved there in 1907.

When Fergusson arrived in Paris, he declared,

"Ici commence la liberte."

For him, Paris really was freedom. And he immediately ran off

to find himself an appropriately squalid studio flat

in Montparnasse.

Fergusson found himself in the very crucible of modern art.

Picasso was painting prostitutes.

Matisse, like a wild beast...

And Andre Derain had entered a dream world all of his own.

Fergusson plunged into the city's social scene.

He captured its elegant bohemians and intellectuals

in a series of bold new canvasses that totally transformed his art.

Fergusson loved Paris and Paris loved him.

What is extraordinary is that two years after moving here,

in 1909, he's elected

a societaire of the Salon d'Automne. This is the most progressive

exhibiting society in Paris.

You're elected onto it by your colleagues and contemporaries.

So to have reached that position and have it recognised within two years,

is extraordinary, and that's why Fergusson, more than any other

British artist, let alone Scottish, plays a part in the birth

of Modern Art.

So, why in that short period, was he esteemed to be worthy

of membership of this society? What was he doing that intrigued them?

You see an immediate change in his work when he arrives here.

There's a series of street scenes of Paris, literally getting to know

his new home. But also he had a great deal of interest in

the Fauve... The so-called Fauve work of artists like Matisse

and Derain. They showed at the Salon d'Automne in 1905.

Their expressive brush strokes, their acidic colour...

were considered so savage that they were christened

the Beasts, the Fauves by the critic Louis Vauxcelles.

And Fergusson is not only one of the first British artists to become

aware of them but to see their work very soon after it's painted.

But more than that, to understand what they were doing,

interpret it and to make it his own.

And that is what he's recognised for when he is a elected a societaire.

Establishing himself in Paris gave Fergusson the freedom

to develop his paintings, his instincts, his ideas...

in a way he could never have done back home.

One of the reasons that Fergusson had flounced out of the Academy

in Edinburgh was because he realised he was going to have to wait

three years before painting a nude model from life.

Now, in Paris, there was no such prudery, he painted from models,

he painted his friends, his lovers.

And increasingly, these canvasses were less about capturing

a likeness, and more about celebrating

what he defined as a kind of "elemental femininity."

Between 1907 and 1913, Fergusson would return to

the female form again and again.

These celebrations of womanhood, sexuality and the feminine spirit

were more radical than anything

being painted in Britain at the time.

His glorious nudes would establish Fergusson as the first

truly modern Scottish painter.

And it was in Paris in 1913

that Fergusson's vision of powerful femininity

was magically transformed into flesh -

in the form of dancer Margaret Morris.

The attraction was immediate and enduring.

But all too soon, Margaret had to return to London.

And without her...Paris lost its lustre.

So Fergusson headed south to the Cote d'Azur,

in search of more sun, more colour.

He rented a cottage on the little-known Cap d'Antibes.

And he wrote repeatedly and desperately,

begging Margaret to join him.

"My dear flapper, I've taken a little villa at Antibes.

"It's practically an island and quite quiet.

"You don't need to dress at all.

"I mean, dress up. If you don't come down, you're a rotter.

"And no sport at all."

At first, Meg resisted, but in the end, well, you would, wouldn't you?

"It was," she said, "just how a perfect honeymoon should be.

"But seldom is."

Together, they revelled in the sun, sea and languid pleasures

of the good life.

With Margaret Morris as his muse, Fergusson finally completed

a work he'd been wrestling with for three years.

It's a painting about love, vitality and a primal lust for life.

Fergusson would call it Les Eus, which means "The Healthy Ones".

It's a monumental canvas that captures what it feels like

to be modern, Continental and Scottish - all at the same time.

In this painting, Fergusson really does manage to capture

the spirit of the age. I mean, this was a time of dazzling upheaval

and change. And Scottish art was part of that bigger picture.

It was bold, it was willing to defy convention.

It was really immersed in the ideas that were shaping the avant-garde.

So this is a time when Scottish art had a particular

and very distinct identity. One that had been shaped by its history,

and by its heritage. But also by its wanderlust, the willingness

of Scottish artists to go out there and meet the world,

to evolve, and to reinvent.

The reason that Scottish art matters, for me,

it's not because it's so unique.

It's because you can see in a painting like this,

it has always been

profoundly engaged in that great collaborative process

that is our common story.

That is the history and the future of art.

The blissful time that Fergusson spent with Margaret Morris

in the South of France was not to last.

One morning, Meg looked out towards the sea and murmured,

"Nothing can ever be as perfect as this."

Shortly afterwards, she went for a stroll,

and pausing beneath the pines,

she started to paint the Antibes lighthouse,

when a gendarme approached. He tapped her on the shoulder

and said, "Miss, it's forbidden."

"But why?" asked Meg, innocently.

"Because of the war."

It was August 1914, when all the innocence and gaiety

had come to a violent end.

GUNS BOOM

Many of Scotland's artists were called away to serve their country.

And when they returned, if they returned, it was to find a nation

irrevocably changed.

In the fractured post-war age, all the beauty, all the life,

all the vigour they had once painted would feel like something from

a bygone era.

In the years that were coming, this world would need its artists

more than ever. It would need them to create new ways of seeing,

it would need them to make sense of a broken world,

in which all those conventions, all those precedents,

all the traditions that we once held dear, lay bleeding in the rubble.