Tim Cornwell: Turkey picture sale has fans in a flutter

It's sad to see any inroads into a national collection. But while Lowry is a popular artist, there's no shortage of his work in Britain, and he's thoroughly celebrated at the Lowry Centre in his home turf of Manchester.

The RSA is pursuing an overhaul in what seems a shift from a very Edinburgh 19th-century artists' society or institution to a "Scottish organisation that promotes contemporary Scottish art" - which is how it's now described on Wikipedia. As part of that it's weeding out some non-Scottish work from its collection.

If an organisation is sitting on a valuable work that isn't seen and doesn't fit, then there's an economic case for selling it in straitened times: free it up for a market that wants it, and free up some cash.

But there's a small catch with the RSA's next major planned sale: Dr John Chalmers. The retired Edinburgh surgeon, 83, wrote a trenchant letter to them, arguing that they should not sell the painting of a turkey family, by the French-American naturalist John James Audubon.

Dr Chalmers's interest in Audubon's work, Wild Turkey Cock, Hen and Young, painted on a visit here over a few weeks in 1826 and given to what was the Scottish Academy shortly after, is far removed from contemporary art happenings.

The Fringe shows launched this week, the degree shows unveiled in Glasgow and Edinburgh, use iPads or CCTV to blur the line between performers and audiences, pursue the immersive and interactive. At the new Riverside Museum of Transport in Glasgow, you are never left alone to browse of a roomful of old cars; you are confronted by it and told about it via a touch-screen video show.

The RSA is modernising in a different way. Most visibly, the annual exhibition, which ended its month-long run this week, has been dusted off, with a clearer look, curated by guest artists.

The RSA has a way to go before its exhibition generates the kind of interest in Edinburgh that the Royal Academy fires up in London. But it stoked up a record sales figures this year - more than 70,000, though against the Royal Academy's 3 million. It's looking for cash to continue the overhaul, balance its books, and to fill the gaps in its collection of Scottish art.

Dr Chalmers wants to save an old painting with a lot of history - Scottish, and American. Audubon was a self-taught American naturalist and bird painter. He's a household name in the US, after turning his paintings into a book, Birds of America, a copy of which recently sold for 7.3m.

But Dr Chalmers' book, Audubon in Edinburgh, chronicles how the painter loved his "fair Edina", and spent nearly three years in the city between 1826 and 1838 on a visit from the US.His career got a major lift in the UK, and especially Edinburgh, where he found the first engraver who helped him make his book. He found support that helped launch his career. In 1992 Edinburgh University sold its set of Audubon's Birds of America; the only complete set in the city, a sale they may now be regretting.

Audubon was offered 100 guineas for the painting of turkeys, but he gave it to the RSA for staging his show for free. His oil paintings are an unknown quantity, but it's thought the work could now fetch a million pounds or more.

There are details and stories around the work of the old-fashioned kind. A young boy, a relation of the portraitist Sir Henry Raeburn, stole a painting from Audubon's show; he was found to be deaf and dumb, and it was quickly recovered.

Audubon met his hero Sir Walter Scott, had his portrait painted by the Edinburgh artist John Syme, a work now hanging in the White House, and had his head inspected by local phrenologists.

It's not a Scottish painting, but it's laced with the kind of connections cherished by the Scottish Government. Apparently it was offered to the National Galleries of Scotland; they passed. Dr Chalmers doesn't want a one-man fight with the RSA. He just doesn't want them to sell a painting.