A brief introduction to Scottish art

When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The English art establishment has never bothered with what was going on north of the border, which explains, though doesn’t excuse, the underrepresentation of Scottish art in the Tate’s so-called national collection.

This leaves a gap in the story of British art that the Fleming Collection has set out to fill. Since its reinvention as a ‘museum without walls’ by director James Knox – a former publisher of this magazine – the best collection of Scottish art outside a public gallery has gone on the road. Last month saw the opening of two new shows: Scottish Women Artists at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, and Window into Scottish Art at the Lightbox, Woking, in collaboration with the Ingram Collection.

Pevsner came to English art as an outsider; Knox approaches Scottish art as a native. He describes his selection of 30 works at the Lightbox as ‘a dive into the Scots psyche’, which – thanks to the Reformation, the Clearances and the collapse of the great industries of Glasgow – has its dark side. But the Scottish love of colour shines through in paint.

Where England is almost uniformly green, Scotland is varicoloured: purple heather, yellow gorse, orange bracken. It was to blend in with the landscape’s vibrant hues that tartan was developed as a clannish camo, and its colours bled through to the Scottish palette. Tweed is a thread running through both shows. The 19th-century landscape painter John Knox, who includes a textile mill in his otherwise Arcadian view of the Vale of Leven, was the son of a yarn merchant and Anne Redpath was the daughter of a tweed designer.