The Cape Club represented just one example of the dynamic interconnectedness that characterised Scottish intellectual and artistic life in the later 18th century, not just across different art-forms, such as painting and literature, but between these and other fields such as science, history, philosophy, anthropology, architecture, technology and medicine. The emergence of landscape painting in Scotland after 1750 also benefited from this cross-fertilisation, pre-eminently in the work of Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840), who trained as an apprentice in the decorative painting firm set up by James Norie (1684-1757), the original pioneer in this field.

Nasmyth was also a distinguished engineer and a landscape gardener, and his paintings reveal a complex and committed engagement with nature not as any escapist idyll, but in terms of its (ideally harmonious) relationship with human society, and as a locus of scientific investigation. Underlining this spirit of modernity, several of his best-known and most rewarding works are actually cityscapes rather than landscapes per se, such as Edinburgh from Calton Hill and Edinburgh from Princes Street with the Royal Institution under Construction, both painted in 1825.

At first glance, the Highland landscapes of Horatio McCulloch (1805-1867) tally more closely with stereotypes of Scottish art, but reveal Nasmyth’s continuing influence in their pursuit of order and clarity, while their associative expansiveness of execution owes an evident debt to Turner, albeit tailored to McCulloch’s native scenes and individual observation.

William McTaggart (1835-1910), in turn developed this expressive freedom and emphasis on atmosphere still further in the dynamic openness of his later land- and seascapes, including Jovie’s Neuk and The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship. The smallness, faintness or complete absence of people depicted within these sweeping expanses of land, water and weather denotes both humanity’s insignificance in relation to the scale and power of nature, but also individuals’ and communities’ powerlessness in the face of similarly indifferent man-made forces like the Clearances - McTaggart was a Highlander - and industrialisation.

The continuing development of these concerns, together with subsequent influences from Continental and American art movements in the landscape field, can be followed onwards through aspects of the Colourists’ work, with S J Peploe, especially, adapting post-Impressionist methods to Scotland’s native palette and topography. Later still, John Houston (b.1930) steers close to outright abstraction, clearly in the wake of US Abstract Expressionism, but displaying an equally evident debt to McTaggart, while the broader issues of reconciling the natural and actual with human invention have found their latest home within the contemporary field of Environmental Art.