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’.