Book review: The Story Of Scottish Art, by Lachlan Goudie

As son and subject of Alexander Goudie, Lachlan has a very personal relationship with Scottish art. Photograph: Robert Pereira Hind

In 2015, Lachlan Goudie – son of the painter Alexander Goudie – wrote and presented a four-part series for BBC TV on The Story Of Scottish Art. The book, following five years later, is a chance to take more time over the subject. However, it still condenses some 7,000 years (he begins with cup-and-ring-marked stones and ends with Peter Doig) into 370 pages. Often, this book feels like a whistle-stop tour through Scottish history, trying to touch base with key artistic achievements along the way.

There hasn’t been a survey history of Scottish art since Scotsman art critic Duncan Macmillan’s seminal volume, first published in 1990 and updated ten years later. This is a very different book. Goudie is clear that he’s no academic but is writing about art out of his personal relationship with it: being painted by and painting with his father, and now working as an artist within a Scottish painting tradition.

The clue to his approach is in the word “story”. He is big on anecdotes (the image of Horatio McCulloch stealing an elephant from a circus and riding it down Hamilton High Street will stay with me), on moments and meetings, personalities and relationships. All this makes for an enjoyable, inviting read, even if it struggles to streamline something as fragmented and multifarious as the history of art (plus aspects of craft and architecture) into a single narrative.

He deserves to be commended for how much ground he covers, from the Ring of Brodgar to the Book of Kells, from the renaissance splendour of Linlithgow Palace to the triumphs of Allan Ramsay’s Enlightenment portraits. He is a vivid, conversational writer, appealing even when he falls back on stereotypes: Vikings who “belched and beserked their way through the landscape, [while] the Christians huddled and prayed for deliverance”.

While guesswork and imagination are necessary when writing about the lives of neolithic stone carvers, Goudie continues to employ these even in much more recent times, suggesting, for example, that James Guthrie came up with the idea for The Hind’s Daughter after going for a walk, with no apparent reference to source material.

To Charles Rennie Mackintosh – who emerges as the hero of the book, the “Immortal Genius” – he attributes a certain control freakery: “You just know that if you visited [his home], he would have followed you around, repositioning everything you touched like some manic turn-or-the-century metrosexual”. Which, true or not, is amusing, and perhaps insightful.

He’s good on Ramsay, and on McCulloch, “guilty of composing an idealised vision of Scotland” while ignoring the impact of the Clearances; he gives Bessie MacNicol her rightful place next to the Glasgow Boys, and spends a surprising couple of pages with the maverick James Pryde. On many topics, he is ready with surprising, well-observed insights.

The 20th century is told largely through painting, from the Colourists to Eardley and Bellany, the New Glasgow Boys and Alison Watt, all of whom can be understood within a Scottish painting tradition. But – and here unease sets in – all this was about to change.

In the 1980s, conceptual art burst forth in Glasgow, blasting apart the traditional ideas of genre and also, Goudie suggests, the idea of a tradition rooted in any one locality. He spends fewer than six pages on it, ending, almost with relief, on Peter Doig, a painter whose work can be linked in part to that earlier Scottish tradition.

It’s an uncertain finish for an ambitious book aiming to define the “character” of Scottish art, and the attempt to weave in the independence referendum (which he says happened in 2015) feels both uncomfortable and something of an afterthought. But it’s a readable, knowledgeable, often entertaining work which one hopes will draw readers in and invite them – as the TV series did – to find out more for themselves.

The Story Of Scottish Art, by Lachlan Goudie, Thames & Hudson, £29.95

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