In a Scottish context, the visual sector like all the arts is also under mounting political pressure to expand its social role, targeted by buzzwords ranging from educational outreach to economic regeneration.

At a more metaphysical level, familiar concerns persist in and around Scottish art over what the very term ‘Scottish art’ signifies - as highlighted, for instance, by the brouhaha over a proposal during the 1990s to create a separate institution housing the Scottish collections of the National Galleries of Scotland – received by some as implicitly contextualising these works outwith the international mainstream.

Is it confiningly parochial to label an artist or work as Scottish, or a means of foregrounding and celebrating distinctiveness? Does Scottishness necessarily connote the marginal, the twee, the old-fashioned, or are Scotland’s putative national traits more timeless and cosmopolitan – or is the notion nowadays so endlessly elastic a ‘brand’ as to render it ultimately meaningless?

A case could be made for each of the above (and often has been), though the resolution of such arguments is thankfully beyond the present remit. Certain primary influences of history, geography and landscape can and do of course play a basic role in characterising art as Scottish. Beyond this, however, the most that can confidently be said is that certain strands of continuity are usefully if loosely discernible between successive generations of artists in Scotland - and that some kind of engagement with the question of national and/or cultural designation, and its changing implications, has recurrently informed those artists’ work.