One thing rapidly becomes clear in these lavish new purpose-built galleries of Scottish art: Scotland likes itself. Or at least, Scottish curators are far fonder of their country than their opposite numbers at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery are of the UK as a whole. Whereas these London museums have recently opened rehangs that call out past injustices and national guilt, Edinburgh’s new look at Scotland’s artistic story is a celebration. It’s also ravishing. The spacious new gallery has big windows that give views of the Scott Monument, Princes Street Gardens and up towards the Old Town. Before you enjoy Scotland’s art you are invited to admire the capital city itself.
A text on the wall praises the beauty of Edinburgh, in case you hadn’t noticed. And in between the picture windows hang paintings that show the same scene 200 years ago. Alexander Nasmyth’s painting, Princes Street with the Commencement of the Building of the Royal Institution, shows a view very close to the one from the windows, under a spacious Romantic sky. But Nasmyth’s view is no tourist postcard. Bleak tenements cling to the side of the Old Town, plummeting to a waste ground – or is it a giant cesspit? – in the dip between the city’s two halves. Poverty shadows the picturesque.
Romantic visions of Scotland jar against stark realities throughout these displays. And yet, loving as this new look at the nation’s art is, it is not dishonest. Among paintings inspired by Highland scenery and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, you come across a display of urban photography by the camera pioneers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. In the 1840s, they recorded old Edinburgh buildings that were about to be demolished to make way for Waverley railway station: the black windows they captured of an orphanage will trouble your dreams.
The chronology is a bit loose and confusing, though, and I found myself turning to landscape art to get my bearings. There’s certainly enough of it. On this telling, Scotland became an ambitious artistic nation in the early 19th century when the Romantic movement, with its belief in the soul-inspiring powers of nature, found its natural home among mountains and lochs. Artists including Nasmyth, James Ward and William Dyce painted Scotland’s scenery with awe. Ward’s painting The Eildon Hills and the Tweed has got it all: a ruin, a river, a rainbow and distant peaks all booming together in a symphony of the sublime.
Was all this passion for place unique to Scotland? Of course not. Landscape enthused artists throughout 19th-century Europe and the US. It’s the places that differ. Where John Constable painted fields in southern England, Scotland’s artists had mighty mountains and violet glens. But that didn’t make them better artists: there’s no Scottish equivalent of Constable or Turner – and, for that matter, Ward was English.
Maybe the curators, trying hard to find “Scottishness”, end up giving us too many landscapes. This oddly results in marginalising Scotland’s greatest early 19th-century artist, the portrait genius Henry Raeburn. He only gets a brief look in, with pictures of Scott and a man in tartan, while his masterpiece – The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch – has not been included in the new Scottish galleries (you’ll find it upstairs).
Just as it’s starting to look like this enthusiastic display packs no real artistic punch, Glasgow comes to the rescue. It was in the late 1800s that the Scottish eye for nature got infused with brilliance. While Victorian England couldn’t see the avant garde for the smog, Scottish artists were alive to new ideas coming from the continent. Modernism prospered in places such as Barcelona, Oslo, Dublin – and Glasgow. In the paintings of the Glasgow Girls and Boys, the passion for raw nature that had long driven Scotland’s art gets a blast of realism and impressionist light. James Guthrie’s painting A Hind’s Daughter (a hind was a farm worker) is a disturbing study of rural poverty. The girl, whose face has the ghostly quality of an old photograph, looks uncomprehendingly yet accusingly at you from a landscape studded with cabbages, all romance gone. The same confrontation between nature painting and social facts cuts deep into paintings by Arthur Melville and Flora Macdonald Reid.
Yet it isn’t just social conscience that makes these pioneers of modernism exceptional. Their paintings blaze with a sharp, electrified light. Melville’s 1881 masterpiece An Egyptian Interior turns observation into ecstasy as he contemplates the golden pattern of tiny luminous stars made by the latticed wooden windows of a Cairo cafe while coloured glasses on a table become abstract forms.
This painting doesn’t simply imitate French impressionists. It experiments with pure modernism, anticipating Matisse. Really special stuff was happening in Scottish art in the late Victorian age. From Melville’s heightened reality, it’s a short step to symbolism, represented by embroidered visions of sensual myth by Phoebe Anna Traquair and John Duncan’s bizarre 1908 painting of the Celtic deity Angus Og blessing the sea. There are watercolours, too, by the great Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and even a cubist view of Edinburgh by William Crozier, the Old Town a constellation of chunks and crystals.
Beside it, the window reveals fractured views of today’s city, under a still-romantic sky. This is the capital of a country that inspires love. If that’s what makes a great nation, Scotland certainly stakes a bold independence claim here.
