Pick a painting

 

Alexander McCall Smith

  There is a painting in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art that I find quite haunting. It is called ‘A Portrait Group’, and is by the Scottish artist James Cowie. Cowie painted this picture in 1933 and then reworked it in 1940. He was an art teacher, and often used his pupils as models. In this painting, he didn’t get the models to sit together, but created the painting from separate studies he had made of various sitters. For me it is about friendship. Here are four young people on the cusp of their adult lives. What lies ahead of them? Will they find friendships as strong as those of these early years? In the background is a Scottish landscape, with wispy low clouds like veils of muslin, so like the clouds I see from the window of my study in Argyll.  

Mervyn King

  In the centre of our drawing-room, I would install the ‘Wilton Diptych’. From the Middle Ages, it shows Richard II being presented to the Virgin and Child. We do not know who painted it, or why, and the mystery is reinforced by Dillian Gordon’s discovery that the orb on the English banner contains a tiny image of a green island set in a silver sea. Shakespeare’s Richard II portrays England as ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’. Would I own a painting Shakespeare saw?  

 

Wendy Cope

  All my favourite paintings are either Dutch or by Constable. The one I love most is Vermeer’s ‘Kitchen Maid’, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The artist has painted an ordinary young woman into immortality and I find this very moving. I like to look at the milk eternally pouring from the jug, the bread forever fresh on the table — all there since 1658.  

 

Terry O’Neill

  The painting I’d most love to own in the world is by Sir Henry Raeburn, ‘The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’ — best known simply as ‘The Skating Minister’.