Presenting Mary as a classical heroine, this pioneering painting was intended to influence the debate around her true nature. Its starting point was an emotional description of Mary’s abdication in The History of Scotland … (1759) by William Robertson. The book was an instantly popular hit and moved James Boswell, a 25-year-old lawyer, writer and ardent admirer of Mary, to tears. In 1765, Boswell embarked on the Grand Tour, and on reaching Rome, turned to Glasgow-born painter Gavin Hamilton, a rising star on the European art scene, to transfer that particular scene onto canvas. Their decision to create a Mary that could become easily associated in the minds of their generation with a classical heroine, full of pathos and drama, led them to play a significant part in re-writing Mary’s story in the late 18th century, as they fast-tracked her transition from a historical figure to a fictional character and a much-loved theme in the arts.

Devoid of sentimentalism, and painted in open air in full sunlight, this depiction of a hedge cutter illustrates many of the characteristics that earned the group of artists known as the Glasgow Boys contemporary recognition at home and abroad. An informal alliance of some twenty artists mostly based in or around Glasgow, the group shared a common dislike for the formulaic landscapes and storytelling pictures associated with late Victorian painting. Many of them went to France in the late 1870s and early 1880s, to study and to work in the Paris studio system or in rural artists’ colonies. There they absorbed the lessons to be learnt from international trends, especially French naturalism and Japanese graphic design. Back at home, they developed their own brand of rural realism, characterised by an interest in the effect of strong sunlight on their subjects, and in experiments inspired by the brilliant colours and flattened forms of Japanese prints.

John Duncan Fergusson was a major figure within the Scottish Colourists, key players in the introduction of modern art to Britain. His big, bold, colourful, ambitious canvas belongs to a significant group of large-scale nudes painted in Paris between 1910 and 1913 that encapsulates the artist’s responses to the soul-searching questions at the origin of modern art, such as the actual purpose of art. Moulded by numerous experiences and conversations with key members of the Parisian avant-garde, Les Eus reflects the artist’s interest in the representation of the female body to explore themes central to his art. Almost akin to a manifesto, it puts forwards his conviction that rhythm was the essential quality in a painting or sculpture; his belief in a spiritual bond between nude and nature; his own vision of the power of the feminine; and sensuality, that to him was associated with fertility and the celebration of life.

English born Joan Eardley devoted most of her career to the ever-changing elusive nature of her subjects in two locations, Glasgow and the remote Aberdeenshire seaside village of Catterline, where this work was painted. In a letter written in Catterline in 1956, Eardley stated: “There’s the old nets to be tackled! Awful thought because I’m frightened of them a bit.” Salmon nets and the sea were a favourite motif, and challenge, in the later years of her career. She would settle her easel on the beach and try to “think of new ways of doing this particular subject”, of capturing the authenticity of her own visual and emotional experiences. Salmon Nets and the Sea belongs to the monumental series of paintings executed in the early 1960s that chronicles Eardley’s wrestle with the dynamic and fast changing North Sea as she was trying to propel her art towards that place which, in her own words, “hangs between reality and abstraction”.