ONCE UPON A TIME
They say never judge a book by its cover, yet the painting on the dust jacket of Lachlan Goudie’s The Story of Scottish Art tells you everything you need to know about the text contained within.
For starters, the Arthur Melville watercolour is not a typically patriotic masterpiece; it’s no iconic Highland landscape or Henry Raeburn’s skating reverend, but rather a very personal take on what it means to be a Scottish artist.
Secondly, it wasn’t even painted in Scotland, but rather the famous Moulin Rouge dancehall in Paris. The colours were an attempt to capture the dancers’ bright tulle petticoats in pure washes of pigment at a time when “abstract art” didn’t truly exist.
And perhaps most importantly, however, it is larger than life. Melville’s original pocketbook study was less than four inches wide, yet here is a detail double that size. It allows us to see the granulating
