Liss Llewellyn are delighted to present an online exhibition of Scottish Art to celebrate St Andrew’s Day.

Many of these works are landscapes, and chart the famously dramatic and diverse countryside of Scotland. There is a study by Gilbert Spencer for one of his most significant post-war works – Hebridean Memory – which recounts his stay on the Isle of Canna with Laird Campbell, and local activities such as mackerel and lobster fishing that he witnessed there. Other Hebridean scenes include Douglas Percy Bliss’ stooping panorama of Barra, or Stephen Bone’s lochside view of Skye, while Ithell Colquhoun takes us into the peaks of the Grampian or Cairngorm mountains with her rare fabric collage of the Highlands.

Moreover, a number of artists featured in this selection were proud Scots. Colquhoun felt her Scottish ancestry predisposed her to the type of second sight and Celtic sensitivity which made her Surrealism all the more successful. Bliss (likewise born in India) was raised in Edinburgh, and became Director of the Glasgow School of Art. The Zinkeisen sisters hailed from Kilcreggan, Sir Hebert James Gunn was a Glaswegian (and served in the 10th Scottish Rifles during the Great War), and Joseph Crawhall, who was originally from Northumberland, but became best-known as one of the Glasgow Boys is here immortalised in The Creeps by his Scottish contemporary, Archibald Standish Hartrick.

This exhibition also contains emblematic images of Scotland, from the Saint Mary’s thistle which appears in Marion Adnams’ botanical study and Charles Mahoney’s The Artist’s Hand, through to the St Andrew’s Cross displayed so prominently in Kenneth Rowntree’s ‘Windy Day’. In these, and the manifold other ways in which Scottishness comes across in the Modern British period, Scottish Art is revealed to be as rich and endlessly surprising as the land itself.