From this point on, Scottish artists were increasingly drawn to London in pursuit of recognition and regular work, a career trajectory followed – via the customary spell in Italy - by the distinguished portrait painter Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), who went on to serve as official portraitist to George III. Eldest son of the poet Allan Ramsay (1685-1758), and a friend of the philosopher David Hume, Ramsay was nonetheless immersed from his youth in the central currents of contemporary Scottish thought, from the self-conscious post-Union efforts – also at work in the literary and musical spheres – to establish a national cultural identity, to the full flood-tide of the Enlightenment. For all its exquisite French-style nuances, much of Ramsay’s work is best viewed in the latter context, with its precepts such as the equivalence of moral and aesthetic sensibility, the privileging of observed truth, and the concomitant view of portraiture as a ‘humane science’.

The Enlightenment-inspired reassessment of ‘primitive’ folk cultures, newly regarded as an expression and source of unmediated truth, or the embodiment of uncorrupted perception – ideas influentially promulgated by the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton (1721-1798) from his studio in Rome – also impacted significantly on painting of this period. The prime example is – or rather was, having been destroyed by fire in 1899 – the room at Penicuik House which became known as The Hall of Ossian, thanks to its magnificent decorations by Alexander Runciman (1736-1785).  

The purported poems of Ossian, recounting the epic adventures of his father, the legendary Celtic hero Fingal, had been published by James Macpherson between 1760 and 1763, in the form of freely-translated fragments of ancient Gaelic poetry, liberally interwoven with his own embellishments. They proved hugely influential on authors from Walter Scott to Johann Goethe, and in establishing the vogue for historicism that spawned many of the popular images and associations still identified with Scotland today. While pledging allegiance to an older, ‘purer’ aesthetic in the drama of its subject-matter, however, Runciman’s mission to paint an epic in true ‘primitive’ style, expressed through the Ossian paintings’ brilliant palette and uninhibited brushwork, produced startlingly modern results.

Runciman belonged to an Edinburgh drinking fraternity known as the Cape Club, a self-consciously bohemian alternative to more aristocratic coteries, with a membership largely comprising writers, actors, musicians and artists, fired by a collective zeal to promote a distinctively Scottish culture. Among them were the poets Allan Ramsay Senior and the younger Robert Fergusson (1750-1774), an important influence on Robert Burns, and the printer Walter Ruddiman, who founded the Caledonian Mercury newspaper, with the express aim of producing ‘not a flimsy shop of imported foreign articles, but a genuine Caledonian magazine’.

Sometimes dubbed the ‘Scottish Hogarth’ the painter David Allan (1744-1796), who spent 10 formative years in Italy before returning to Scotland in 1780, pursued similar goals in applying his studies of Mediterranean folk cultures to the rural lower orders of his native society. Paintings such as The Highland Dance and The Penny Wedding, as well as his celebrated illustrations for Allan Ramsay Senior’s verse play The Gentle Shepherd (notable not least for their early use of aquatint) marked a key evolution in Scottish genre and pastoral painting. While celebrating the ‘natural’ lives of ‘unspoiled’ country people, Allan did so emphatically without condescension, instead devoting to these subjects all the modern skills and sophistication gleaned from the best artistic education then available.

A comparable approach was deployed with even greater success by David Wilkie (1785-1841), whose fame rests chiefly on paintings such as The Blind Fiddler, The Penny Wedding and The Village Festival, combining Dutch genre techniques with closely-observed Scottish country scenes, as well as the keen awareness of social and economic realities movingly highlighted in Distraining For Rent. He also painted a famous group portrait of Sir Walter Scott and his family, implicitly reflecting the exploration of similar concerns in the writer’s work. Wilkie’s later career saw him turning more towards historical and religious subjects, as in the old-master echoes of John Knox Preaching before the Lords of Congregation.