10 of Scotland's most loved paintings – which one's yours?

Iconic and balletic, the figure gliding across frozen Duddingston Loch is thought to be the Reverend Robert Walker, minister of the Canongate Kirk and a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society, the oldest club of its kind in Britain. Of course, there are many other Raeburns we could have chosen – and some have disputed whether this painting is indeed by the artist – but this stands out. The artist John Byrne has described it as his favourite painting, saying, “The Reverend swaggers as he skates and Raeburn swaggers too with his elegant brushwork and control of that most slippery medium – light.” Can be seen at the National Gallery of Scotland, The Mound.

Windows in the West, Avril Paton (1993)

The print of this well-loved painting of a tenement on Glasgow’s Saltoun Street, snowbound following a sudden flurry, hangs as a print on many a wall, and had a starring moment in T2 Trainspotting. Look closely at it, hanging in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, and it’s possible to see people, many of them the real residents, beyond the windows, getting on with their daily lives. Paton, who painted it over many months whilst living opposite the building, has said, “I didn’t know at that time this picture was going to become popular and find its way into a public domain because if I had known that I would have hesitated to put in real people who might have objected”. Its title derives not just from the fact that Glasgow is in the west of the country, but because it shows how people live in what we call, globally, the west.

The Last of the Clan by Thomas Faed (1865)

Inspired by the kind of scenes of forced emigration that were occurring in 19th century Scotland, the Last of the Clan sums up some of the sorrows of the Highland Clearances. “When the steamer had slowly backed out,” reads the catalogue entry from its exhibition at the Royal Academy, “and John MacAlpine had thrown off the hawser [rope], we began to feel that our once powerful clan was now represented by a feeble old man and his granddaughter, who, together with some outlying kith-and-kin, myself among the number, owned not a single blade of grass in the glen that was once all our own.” It has been said that Thomas Faed was to Scottish art what Robert Burns was to poetry and song. The Last of the Clan hangs in Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Children and Chalked Wall 3, Joan Eardley (1962-3, National Galleries of Scotland)

It wasn’t just that Joan Eardley’s paintings told an important story of the stark reality of childhood in Glasgow’s post-war slums, it was how she painted them – renting a studio in one of Glasgow’s poorest districts, Townhead, an area slated for demolition. Eardley went out onto the streets, sketching the kids, and among those to whom she repeatedly returned was the Samson family of 12 children, two of whom feature in this painting. In 2014 some of the sisters spoke to the Daily Record of their memories, “We loved going to the studio and Joan would make us treacle and cheese sandwiches. Each time she painted us, we got 3d and we’d go straight to the sweetie shop. Any paintings she wasn’t pleased with, and there were lots, she’d give to us and we’d make paper planes with them or they’d be used to light the fire.”

Sabine, Alison Watt (2000)

Deep recesses, extravagant billows. The human body is somehow there in this voluptuous painting and yet not. Sabine is from a series of works entitled Shift and inspired by the sensuousness Watt observed in the drapings of fabric and clothing in the French painter Jean-Dominique Ingres’ portraits. It is a study in folds and creases, suggestive rather than literal. In an interview with the Herald in 2014, Watt said, “I think the reason I make the paintings I make now is because there are certain roportions that are satisfying and make sense to me, and that comes from my fascination with the human body.”

Large Tree Group, Victoria Crowe (1975)

On a snowy day, near the artist’s then home at Kittleyknowe, the shepherd Jenny Armstrong passes below this row of giant beech. Trees have been figures in Crowe’s work throughout her career, and they dominate this painting, but it’s the tiny, embattled human figure that draws the eye, just as it might have done when the artist peered from her window. Crowe once described to me the entry of Armstrong into her paintings. “I’d see her every day and gradually she’d sort of intrude a bit more on the landscapes I was painting. She never posed for a portrait. I couldn’t say, ‘Sit there, Jenny and I’ll draw you.’ She wouldn’t like that – and I couldn’t take photographs of her. It would have been somehow intrusive.”

A Hind’s Daughter, Sir James Guthrie (1883, National Galleries of Scotland)

The Glasgow Boys were inspired by French and Dutch naturalism, and the idea of painting real rural working lives, rather than empty dramatic landscapes or sentimental scenes. Guthrie, the leading painter of the group, created this image of this bold-eyed girl Grace Anderson, pausing after cutting a cabbage, while living at Cockburnspath in the Scottish Borders. It tells a story of harsh rural existence – of childhood work and the life of the hind, a skilled farm labourer, for whom cabbage was the staple diet. The dreich day, the light on the cabbage leaves, all of this makes it, as artist Caroline Walker has put it, “an extremely Scottish painting”. 

Les Eus, J D Fergusson (1910)

Charged with a wild eroticism, this exuberant dance was painted by JD Fergusson, the most adventurous and avant-garde of the Scottish Colourists. Dance, notably, would feature much in his life – his great love was the innovative dance choreographer Margaret Morris. Les Eus is sometimes translated as those who have or own but Fergusson himself would use the phrase ‘the healthy ones’. Some have read into it a statement on gender – those female scupltural figures look as powerful as the men. The great art historian Duncan Macmillan described it as “without doubt one of the most original and ambitious British paintings of its time.” See it at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

Self-portrait in Flowered Jacket, John Byrne (1971)

You could call Byrne Scotland’s ultimate selfie artist. The artist, dramatist and stage-designer produced so many self-portraits, some of them exaggerated, caricatured, surreal, many psychologically intense. A whole room of 40 of these protean images are currently on display at the John Byrne – A Big Adventure exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery. This early portrait is the one, however, we chose, being perhaps his most familiar Byrne, painted after his returning from California with a ‘Flower Power’ hippy vibe and said to be a tribute to an artist he admired: one of the best-known outsiders of modern art, Henri Rousseau. Your own favourite John Byrne selfie may be quite another.

Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, Gavin Hamilton (1760-1763)

There is little else quite so grand and epic in Scottish Art as Gavin Hamilton’s neoclassical, Iliad-inspired scene depicting Achilles, in his grief, over the dead body of his close friend, Patroclus, killed by the Trojans. It says something about its popularity that this is the most viewed painting by a Scottish artist on the National Galleries of Scotland website. Why are so many drawn? For some, it’s the fact it portrays the love of Achilles for Patroclus, a story often considered to be one of gay love. For others it’s simply the most impressive neoclassical work to come out of Scotland