The ideal of art as a force for social renewal also informed the multifaceted career of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and the late 19th century Arts and Crafts movement with which he was linked. To be remembered as the father of modern town planning might not seem the funkiest of honorifics, but Geddes – who was this and much more besides – was Scotland’s leading pioneer of a holistic, ecological philosophy of social dynamics which, in Duncan MacMillan’s summation, held ‘that economics was an integral part of human biology, and art an integral part of economics’.

The siting of decorative art in public buildings represented a key practical manifestation of these beliefs, while the architecture of those buildings was another uniting concern. As founder of the of Edinburgh Social Union, for instance, Geddes commissioned murals from the artist Phoebe Traquair (1852-1936) for the mortuary chapel of the Sick Children’s Hospital in Edinburgh. (Traquair, in keeping with the applied-arts enthusiasms of the times, was also noted for her work as a bookbinder, illustrator, enamellist and embroiderer.)

Having delivered a powerful and influential speech at the first International Congress for the Advancement of Arts in Association with Industry, held in Liverpool in 1888, Gedes was instrumental in bringing the second to Edinburgh the following year. At the latter event, the movement’s leading figurehead, William Morris, was heard baldly to assert that, ‘Painting is of little use, and sculpture less, except where their works form part of architecture.’

The energetic blend of pragmatism and utopianism within Arts and Crafts thinking found fertile ground in Scotland, where the Glasgow School of Art had begun life in 1845 as a Government School of Design, adding fine art and architecture to the curriculum towards the end of the century. The 18th century forerunner to the Edinburgh College of Art, which opened in 1906, was similarly founded by the city’s Board of Manufacturers, albeit that its intervening incarnation as the Royal Academy school was more of an establishment body.

Geddes, Traquair and their interdisciplinary allies were staunch believers in the primacy of art’s decorative function, an approach that facilitated historical allusions to Celtic and classical styles, while also promoting a highly contemporary and sophisticated philosophy of design, and opening the door to influences such as Japanese painting. This interest in the democratising potency of the decorative, addressed in a modern painterly context, can also be seen in the work of the Glasgow Boys.

As Arts and Crafts evolved into Art Nouveau and early modernism, Scotland produced key figure of the movement in the Glaswegian architect, designer and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). The integration of form and function, traditional and modern, was central to Mackintosh’s aesthetic, as epitomised in his designs for a chain of tea rooms run by his patron Kate Cranston – among them the surviving Willow Tea Rooms - which included not only decorations but all items of furniture and other equipment.

The complex artistic ideology behind Mackintosh’s understanding of terms like ‘form’ and ‘function’, however, resulted in work that influenced early modern architecture and design across Europe and beyond, especially after it was featured in the Vienna Secessionist Exhibition of 1900. In building on contemporary enthusiasms for the decorative, it encompasses both pared-down formalism and a rich strand of symbolism that simultaneously recalls old mythologies and prefigures aspects of Surrealist iconography.

Mackintosh’s masterpiece is the main Glasgow School of Art building, twelve years in the making and completed in 1909, the outstanding embodiment of ‘what he drew from his national heritage, and the use he made of avant-garde styles, both elements wholly incorporated into the building.’ So says one expert enthusiast, in a paean to this much-loved Glasgow landmark which is worth quoting in full:

‘The drama of the massive wall of the east façade – reminder of the solid geometry of the Scottish castle, the reaching for height, with the fascinating fenestration of the west face, the confrontation of the glass of the large windows of the north façade, boldly interrupted by the decorative flourishes of large iron brackets which sweep upwards from below the first floor windows, and inside the strong announcements of timbers of their functional purpose, the generous spaciousness of the studios, the wholly different effect of the library white light filters from the astragalled windows among verticals of pine wood, with not a hint of the willowy curves of Art Nouveau until one enters the Board Room or the Director’s Room, where the curves are restrained, and the effect is of that white purity of vision, characteristic of even the most decorative of Mackintosh’s furnishing – all this, in the building which won the competition for Honeyman and Kepple [the architectural firm he had joined seven years earlier] in 1896, is the summation of Mackintosh’s genius.’

Other key Mackintosh buildings that have been preserved or restored include the Scotland Street School and Hill House. The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery and McLellan Galleries also hold important Mackintosh collections, while the House for an Art Lover was built according to a blueprint he created in 1901. Mackintosh left Scotland in 1914, firstly for England, before settling in southern France during the 1920s, where he turned exclusively to painting, producing a series of exquisite flower studies and inventive watercolour landscapes.