AT THE centre of Lachlan Goudie’s breezy and readable book The Story of Scottish Art, the central paradox of a cultural conundrum — the non-existence of Scottish art — is served up on a plate.

The Scottish attitude to art has never recovered from the Scottish Inquisition that was the Calvinist Reformation led by John Knox. He and his followers destroyed the images that decorated churches, and forbade “Pope-ish” representations of religious themes. 

The deadly influence of Knox lingers on in Free Church congregations and in the national psyche as wilful philistinism — a deliberate ignorance of, and entrenched scepticism towards, art.

This paradox, that Scottish culture is inherently anti-art, is something that Goudie demonstrates but doesn’t think through.

The great artist hero, probably the most significant that Scotland has ever produced, is David Wilkie (1785-1841), a prodigiously talented son of the manse from a small village in Fife. He was the first to depict on canvas what Burns had achieved in poetry, a sympathetic portrayal of the lives of the ordinary majority of people.

Wilkie upturned the class attitude of the salon. Following the well-trodden path of the ambitious painter from village, to Edinburgh, to London and to Paris and beyond, he remained true to his roots, his class loyalties and his humanity.

His early masterpiece Distraining for Rent (1815) portrays a tenant farmer confronted by the bailiff and the repossession gang. There is no condescension, no joke and no Hogarthian satire. It is a contemporary tragedy depicted with the seriousness of the greatest works of neoclassicism. It remains relevant.

Wilkie was the foremost proponent of realist painting in his generation and respected as such by the British establishment, including the Duke of Wellington and George IV, and also by the European masters Gericault, Delacroix and David.

His painting The Defence of Saragossa (1828) shows a woman stepping over the corpse of her husband to fire a cannonade. It came before, and was the direct inspiration for, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), the image that is the founding icon of French national art and the secular values of the French republic.

So there has never been anyone better qualified to produce the defining masterpiece of Scottish art than Wilkie and it is a revelation that he attempted it.

But in the exact centre of Goudie’s lavishly illustrated account is not the full-colour masterpiece you might expect but an unfinished painting. This totally unsatisfactory image is the black hole at the centre of the Scottish cultural enterprise — Wilkie’s unfinished John Knox Dispensing the Sacrament at Calder House.

It is a shock to realise, as you contemplate the few touched-in faces amid the acreage of blank canvas, that Knox’s prohibition still holds. 

There has never been an image of the Protestant sacrament. The art, were it to exist, would show you the body, the temperament, the sexuality and the material conditions of those who wield this sacred power. By becoming an image it would situate itself in history. It would lose its command of the absolute. It would become human.

But Wilkie failed and his failure is the true story of Scottish art which is, as Goudie eventually admits, just a “mongrel” tradition of poor substitutes for this abandoned image that fails to remake the contract between art and nation.

Of course, art is a middle-class racket and there is plenty of wool to pull over the eyes, and to read Goudie is like being tugged around the Scottish galleries by a precocious schoolboy. There are  stone circles, incomprehensible Picts and horrible Vikings, as well as biscuit-tin Romantic landscapes, the derided esoteric Mackintosh and the sun-drenched holidays of the Scottish Colourists. 

But none of this can escape the shadow of Calvinist disapproval. No sex, please.

Towards the end, at the high point of Scottish commercial art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Goudie quotes the founding father of Scottish nationalism, Hugh MacDiarmid. At that moment, when art was partner to the revolution in Russia, MacDiarmid delivers the judgement that persists to this day and his words fairly reek with Calvinist sulphur: “Our best constructive minds have taken up engineering and only sentimentalists have practised art.”

It is amazing that such a comprehensive dismissal of the significance of Scottish art is given pride of place in a book that is attempting to celebrate it.

Goudie’s historical survey is also weakened by his failure to acknowledge Scotland’s enormous contribution to the organisation of labour, the foundation of the ILP and the early ties to the Soviet Union in the person of John MacLean, the only Bolshevik Consul in Britain.

These factors have impacted on Scottish art through working-class painters like Ken Currie and sculptors like George Wylie, both unmentioned in Goudie’s book. 

Without them, and the tradition of socialism in Scotland, the only supposedly Scottish art that remains is that of rich tourists — of Fergusson returning to Skye in old age or of Doig doodling in the Caribbean. Both are completely unmoored from the social reality of Scotland and both are only significant as purveyors of fantastically expensive art commodity-oddities.

You can’t escape the conclusion that art in Scotland doesn’t exist because there is no such thing as Scottish Protestant art.

Or is there? At the City Art Centre in Edinburgh the exhibition Jock McFadyen Goes to the Pictures, currently suspended due to Covid, offers another way to interrogate the Scottishness of Scottish art by pairing his own painting with images from the national collection.

McFadyen’s work is exhilaratingly bleak and empty and even emptier than the canvas that Wilkie never finished. His abstract paintings, reducing the surface to a single expanse of silvery monochrome, make Rothko look extravagantly meaningful. 

Sometimes the void has a faint sprinkling of life — a balloon snagged on a twig, dogs that gaze vacantly, a ruined post-industrial streetscape or even a ghost.They are paired with Goudie’s favourites — Eardleys, Cadells and others — that go all the way back to the first portraits that came after the Scottish Reformation. 

There is a raw humour to the exercise but each pairing is a ruthless exposure of the pretension of the other’s image. “I’m a whole load more Scottish than you,” MacFadyen seems to say.

In MacFadyen’s work you may get a glimmer of what an image of the Protestant sacrament might be. It requires the total elimination of feeling and an artless view of the world as unredeemed and devoid of meaning without a very specific and unknowable God. 

It’s tough and inescapably Scottish. But at least it’s art.

The Story of Scottish art is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95. Jock McFadyen talks about his exhibition, scheduled to run until April 21, at edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on