Duncan Macmillan: A price worth paying for the modern artist

Things have improved. Scottish art no longer appears an oxymoron either to us, or to our neighbours. Nevertheless, second-class citizens in our own National Gallery, we still should not suppose that our art is of interest to anybody other than ourselves, or that it could have significance in the wider history of art. How wrong that is.

Consider this: the Scottish Enlightenment has done much to shape the modern world. It was powered by empirical philosophy, the idea that all knowledge is deduced from experience. Sight is queen of the senses and principal agent of experience. It stands to reason that the artists whose business was seeing would be up alongside the philosophers; and so they were. Allan Ramsay and David Hume, for instance, were close friends. One of the thoughts they shared was how limited empirical knowledge actually is and how imagination fills the gap it leaves. Since then it has been axiomatic that in art the imagination is primary. It never was before. There was also the idea of moral sense: that morality originates not in reason, but in feeling. Poor old Adam Smith gets all our economic woes dumped at his door, but he changed our lives in another very profound way too. He proposed that the cement of society is not reason, but sympathy. The idea that as a society we might share responsibility for each other begins there. Sympathy is also a function of imagination, and art is the instrument to cultivate it; modern art springs from that idea.

So who was the first modern artist? Alexander Runciman has a good claim. If he is less well-known than Raeburn or Wilkie, perhaps it is because his major work, Ossian's Hall, was destroyed in a fire. It was an astonishing ceiling in Penicuik House, painted with scenes from the poetry of Ossian during three feverish months of the summer of 1772. The rapidity of execution was indicative of the creative fire, the spontaneity and imaginative brilliance of Runciman's work, qualities that embodied the idea of the primitive. Before human sensibility became clouded by property and self-interest, or was shackled by convention, the imagination was free; art from that time at the beginning of history should be the model for the modern. These ideas were to become synonymous with modern art. Think of Matisse and Picasso imitating "primitive" African art.

All is not lost for Runciman however. After Ossian's Hall, he painted another monumental ceiling. It was in the church that the Episcopalians built for themselves in the Cowgate, the first built in the new tolerant climate of the Enlightenment.In a half-dome, twenty four feet across, Runciman painted the Ascension of Christ, but the church was built in the wrong place. As soon as it was completed, its congregation began to move to the New Town. Redundant, it was sold to the United Presbyterians. They had no time for such idolatrous decorations in their kirk. When, later, the church was sold again to become St Patrick's Catholic church, the painting was forgotten and so, was supposed destroyed. Many years ago, however, I worked out that it was still there under layers of paint. Even if I had had the money, recovering the painting with the techniques of conservation then available would have damaged it irreparably. Things are different now. The team from the Conservation Studio in Leith have done a test that reveals that, although there is some damage, on the whole the original painting under all the layers of paint seems as vivid as one could ever have hoped. A lost masterpiece and a pioneering work in the history of modern art is sitting there waiting to be revealed. All it needs is a little money. If we managed to find 23 millions to buy Anthony d'Offay's "gift" of Artist Rooms, some of doubtful significance, surely we could find the fraction of that sum needed to recover a major work that shows our place in the real history of modern art?