The four painters nowadays collectively known as the Scottish Colourists – S.J. Peploe (1871-1935), J D Fergusson (1874-1961), F C B Cadell (1883-1937) and Leslie Hunter (1877-1931) – were Scotland’s most gifted interpreters of the radical new French ideas about perception, representation, technique, light, colour and subject-matter that galvanised the early 20th century art world. From this broadly common base, however, each pursued his own individual direction, in part by applying the lessons of Manet, Gaugin, Cézanne, Matisse, Cubism and the Fauves to a Scottish context and palette, while exploring new concepts of harmony and balance in a manner often implicitly informed by Geddes and the decorative tradition.

These older allusions are more overt in the diverse pictorialism of the Edinburgh School, who flourished immediately after World War I, but allied to a very modern bohemianism. Outwith this group, the economic and international turbulence of the inter-war years coincided with the literary ‘Scottish Renaissance’, which saw authors and poets led by Hugh MacDiarmid grappling with the self-imposed challenge of defining and creating contemporary forms of Scottish literature.

In a small country like Scotland, artistic circles tend not to be genre-specific, and the interchange of ideas between writers and painters concerning the social, political, national and international functions of art was a lively and fruitful one. The results included work as varied in its potency as the later paintings of James Cowie (1886-1956), with their blend of Art Nouveau and Surrealism; the machine-inspired semi-abstraction of William McCance (1894-1970), and the contemporary Continental and American techniques, harnessed to local Scottish sensibilities, explored by William Johnstone (1897-1981).  

The Colourists remained active well into this period, although Fergusson was the only survivor by the time he returned to Glasgow from Paris in 1939, choosing the city as his base for its combination of Celtic, heavy-industrial and non-academic traditions. ‘What we would like to see is West Coast Glasgow art in the same class as the Queen Elizabeth’, he declared. The ideal of integrating art and applied design reveals the lingering legacy of Geddes, and also helped prompt a revival of printmaking during this period.

As well as Scotland’s close links with contemporary French art, too, the cooler winds of expressionism were beginning to be felt from northern Europe – a geographical affinity, after all, which makes a lot more immediate sense than one with southern France. This rich brew of native and foreign influences can be variously traced through the work of artists such as William Gillies (1898-1973), William Wilson (1905-1972), Ian Fleming (1906-1994), William McTaggart (1903-1981), Anne Redpath (1895-1965) and James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998), in forms ranging from still life to woodcuts, but often in highly individualised explorations of landscape.