Older surveys of Scottish art history have tended to follow a familiar litany of how and why its achievements have remained relatively modest: the damage wrought by prolonged conflict with England, the destruction and disapprobation of religious art during and after the Reformation, the brevity of Scotland’s existence as a unified and independent state, ended by the successive Unions of 1603 and 1707, with the resulting southward removal of royal and aristocratic patronage. The romanticised popularisation of Highland imagery and its reductive co-option as a national emblem, during the later 18th and 19th centuries, has also been seen as largely deleterious, coinciding as it did with Scotland’s apparently thorough incorporation into the British imperial project. Against this Anglocentric backdrop, the positioning of 20th century Scottish artists on the periphery of key trends and movements, at least until recent years, has often been presented as a given.

In common with many other areas of Scotland’s culture, however, its visual arts have latterly been the object of significant historical and critical re-examination, at once prompted by and feeding back into the contemporary sense of cultural renewal that has blossomed since the 1980s. Easily the outstanding work in this respect is Duncan Macmillan’s Scottish Art 1460-1990 (1990). Professor of the History of Scottish Art at Edinburgh University, Curator of the Talbot Rice Gallery, and longtime art critic of the Scotsman newspaper, Macmillan subsequently updated the already hefty volume – which deservedly won the The Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award on its original publication – to take in developments up to the end of the millennium.

Adroitly balancing scholarship with approachability, Macmillan’s painting-centred survey makes a persuasive overall case for ‘Scottishness’ in art as having always included strong elements of internationalism, innovation and active engagement with contemporary trends. At the same time, he says, Scottish artists’ responses to such wider influences have frequently been shaped by more localised particularities of circumstance, thought, tradition and experience, and thus at least striven towards that elusive ideal synthesis of the specific and the universal.

Among other examples, Macmillan identifies Neil Gow (1793), a portrait of the celebrated Scottish fiddler by Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), as embodying an illustrative concentration of these qualities. At the cusp of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, the painting gives marvellously vivid and resonant expression to beliefs about the twinned moral and aesthetic pre-eminence of simplicity, directness and intuition in matters of perception, and the consequent superiority of folk music and poetry. Also at work in what is, not least, a superlative character study, is the post-Reformation emphasis on the primacy of individual autonomy, developed by David Hume and others into the philosophical investigation of human nature itself, together with a social consciousness that prefigures the work of David Wilkie (1785-1841) and the Glasgow Boys.