10 best Scottish artists of the 20th century

J D Fergusson

Born in the Victorian era, John Duncan Fergusson qualifies because he made his name in the early part of the 20th century as one of the Glasgow Colourists. In 1907 he moved to Paris without a penny to his name and plugged himself into what was happening at the heart of modern art, familiarising himself with the work of Picasso and Derain. Renowned for his paintings of the female form, he was an internationalist in outlook. But Scotland was always part of his work. Look out for the landscape paintings he did on a motoring tour of the Scottish Highlands in 1922. They have a freshness and a boldness that thrill.

Doris Zinkeisen

Society portrait painter, costume designer, socialite, Zinkeisen - originally from Rosneath - was one of the artists whose work was championed in the Modern Scottish Women exhibition at Modern Two in Edinburgh nearly a decade ago. Although perhaps best known for her theatre work, she was a formidable portrait painter before the war. But when she was commissioned to document the work of St John Ambulance in the Second World War she became the first artist to enter Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated. Her subsequent painting, Belsen, April 1945, is a harrowing vision of hell.

(Image: Joan Eardley)

Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley, one of Scotland’s most popular artists (though she was born in Sussex), is often remembered most for her strikingly expressionistic portraits of Glasgow street children. But it’s the paintings she did in the fishing village of Catterline that I like best - canvases that grapple with the scale and wildness of the Aberdeenshire coastal landscape. To look at a painting like Summer Fields is to hear the ticking, sun-drowsy heart of the season.

Alan Davie

There’s a great movie to be made about Alan Davie. He manned aircraft batteries in the Second World War, played in jazz bands, drank with Jackson Pollock, and drove an E-Type Jaguar. In short, he made being an artist look like fun. (Jock McFadyen certainly thought so. It was seeing photos of Davie in his Jag that got McFadyen - more of whom later - interested in becoming an artist.)

The art’s not bad either. It sings with colour and pattern and intrigues with its religious and mystic symbolism. “I do not paint what I feel, I feel what I paint,” he once said. “I do not create things, I discover them.”

Born in Grangemouth in 1920 he was still working well into his nineties. I visited his studio five years before his death in 2014 and he spent our time together constantly doodling. “I just can’t stop,” he told me. “It’s a relentless urge.”

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Another great Scottish landscape artist (it was a toss-up between Barns-Graham and Bet Low for this spot if I’m honest). Born in St Andrews, Barns-Graham would become a member of the St Ives School of painters alongside Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. But when she inherited a house near St Andrews she divided her time between Scotland and Cornwall. Her abstract art used vibrant colour and geometric forms to bring a pulsing potency to her paintings. She died in 2004. A new film - Mark Cousins’ award-winning A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things - will hopefully recharge the interest in her work.

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William Gear

Gear was at Edinburgh College of Art at the same time as Barns-Graham, but his approach to abstraction is spikier and more angular. (Could you say more masculine?) Born in Methil, Gear travelled Europe after leaving Edinburgh College of Art, settling in Paris after the Second World War. Britain and British art seemed largely irrelevant to him at the time. An invitation from Barns-Graham to St Ives to see the work of the St Ives School left him underwhelmed. “I was a Parisian now,” he said. “It was pretty small beer to me.”

Still, he returned to Britain in 1950 and his painting Autumn Landscape earned a prize at the Festival of Britain as well as criticism in the House of Commons. Gear fell out of favour in the second half of the century but his paintings retain their power. His 1955 Winter Landscape, a burnished sky over a black hill, divided by a thin line of orange, may be my favourite Scottish painting.

(Image: Eduardo Paolozzi)

Eduardo Paolozzi

There’s an argument for saying that, in British terms at least, Paolozzi is Pop Art. He was certainly one of its great pioneers. The Leith-born artist might not thank you for it though. He always saw himself as a surrealist. But his interest in consumer imagery and mechanisation marked him out as a man of his time, though his moment was to continue on well after the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, with his many public sculptures in Edinburgh and elsewhere, as well as his London Underground mosaics, he is one of the most visible of Scottish artists. One might say the 20th century made a mark on him and in turn he made a mark on the 20th century.

Steven Campbell

The blowsy melodrama of Peter Howson’s work may now be the most familiar art that emerged from the quartet of painters labelled The New Glasgow Boys in the 1980s, but Campbell’s, I would argue, was the best. His paintings offered a storied vision that drew on boys’ own adventures, literature and film to create a Campbellworld of the imagination. His 1990 exhibition On Form and Fiction at the CCA (or The Third Eye Centre as it was then) covered the entire wall space and remains one of the most thrilling exhibitions I’ve ever seen. 

Campbell also looked the part. His obituary of the artist, Sandy Moffat - no mean painter himself - suggested that “Campbell looked as if he had arrived from the Paris or Vienna of the late 19th century.”

His early death at the age of just 54 was a terrible loss to Scottish art.

Jock McFadyen

Born in Paisley, McFadyen is the artist of urban decay and detritus, of water damage, warped wood and rusted metal. The author Iain Sinclair has declared him “the laureate of stagnant canals, filling stations and night football pitches.” His landscapes offer the thrill of ruin lust. In person, he is spiky, informed, engaged and engaging. He is also very funny. His paintings have all of those energies too, as well as the wildness of his younger years. And yet there is a technical exactitude brought to bear too. The results are always powerful, but also precise.

Alison Watt

And finally … Alison Watt’s paintings may be among the quietest on this list. But restraint is not necessarily a sign of passionlessness. Rather, her work has a cool, controlled intensity to it whether she is painting people or textiles. Like McFadyen, she remains as creative and as busy as ever today.