The Story of Scottish Art - Season 1

Lachlan Goudie visits the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, a stone circle that has stood for thousands of years. He also encounters the Westray Wife, an ancient figurine on the island of Westray that is the oldest sculpted human figure in the British Isles.

There is also a look at the sophisticated art of the Picts and the Gaels, the exuberant Renaissance period of the early Stuart kings, and the destruction of the Reformation, when religious artworks in Scotland were all but wiped out.

The 18th century heralded the greatest blossoming of Scottish artistry in its history. The most powerful and influential figures in Britain clamoured to have their portraits painted by Allan Ramsey and Henry Raeburn and their houses designed by Robert Adam; they stood in awe at the epic Highland landscapes of Horatio McCulloch and wept at the sensitive genre paintings of David Wilkie.

In this film Scots artist Lachlan Goudie explores how the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment and the classical influence of the continent gave these artists the confidence and the inspiration to forge a whole new artistic landscape.

From dusty storerooms of Edinburgh to the dazzling antiquities of ancient Rome this will be a journey of startling contrasts: between the past and the future, between the forces of reason and romance, between Presbyterian restraint and unfettered emotion. Out of the ashes of the Reformation a new culture identity was beginning to emerge and it was built on art.

In this film artist, Lachlan Goudie, explores how, at the turn of the 19th century, Scotland's artists challenged the traditions they had inherited and, embracing new ways of seeing and painting from the Continent, revolutionised Scottish art.

From the Glasgow Boys' intimate rural realism, to Arthur Melville's brilliantly experimental watercolours; from Hill House, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's 'total work of art', to J.D Fergusson's pioneering Scottish modernism, this generation transformed the way we saw Scotland's landscape and identity.

A look at how Scottish art has wrestled with questions of identity over the last century.