This is the second in a series of exhibitions of modernist Scottish painting following on from our very successful show in the summer of 1013. Once again we have tried to cover the hundred years or so that defines the Modem period, but this time with an emphasis on the post-war decades.

Our starting point is William McTaggart (1835-1910) and his wonderful painting: St Columba's First Sermon. McTaggart was, for the first Scottish Modernists, what the Impressionists were for the Post-Impressionists in France. A painter's painter, prolific and ambitious, by the end of his life he had left genre painting behind to become a glorious Impressionist, like Monet at Giverny.

FCB Cadell's oeuvre of lona paintings represents a significant contribution to Scottish art and Sound of Iona with Wing Boat is a perfect example: direct, strongly designed and faithful to the day it was painted.

Dawyck Haig, who died in 2009, had his first exhihition with The Scottish Gallery in 1945, and was one of the great painters of The Borders. The Black Hill, which is above Earlston near his ancestral home at Bemersyde, displays his best qualities of strong design and local colour.

By Joan Eardley, we have a powerful Catterline Seascape, a rediscovered portrait of Angus Neil and a significant group of works on paper.

Early drawings by Bellany and Blackadder remind us of their unique contributions to Scottish modern art, while two of the towering figures of the seventies and eighties: Philipson and Morrocco are represented by important paintings.

Of the senior contemporary landscape painters, we have works by Barbara Rae and James Morrison whose Glasgow tenement painting of 1964 was only recently rediscovered in the vaults of Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Text by Guy Peploe, Scottish Gallery