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Strang talks about the progressive avant-garde art world of the 1930s in Edinburgh, Scotland which centered on three men and three institutions. Besides the efforts of Herbert Read, Hubert Wellington and Stanley Cursiter at the university, art college and national galleries, Edinburgh's avant-garde art world of the 1930s consisted of the activities of many other individuals and institutions, not least the progressive an which Scottish artists were making--and were able to see--in the capital during the decade. Throughout die decade, the Society of Scottish Artists' (SSA) annual exhibitions showcased the best of the country's contemporary art, hung alongside loans of significant European modern art.

The painting was bought in a blaze of publicity by the director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Stanley Cursiter, who boasted in the pages of The Scotsman that the gallery had acquired \"a newly discovered portrait of a youth by Botticelli\". While the picture closely resembled a painting in the Louvre attributed to the \"school of Botticelli\", Cursiter noted that the work he had acquired was \"clearly superior\". It was not: by 1952, three years after Cursiter left the galleries, his successor Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse had helped confirm that the Louvre had the original painting. Scotland was the proud owner of a 20th century copy.

The first-floor flat can be found tucked away on Royal Circus, where Scotland's first ever GBP 1 million townhouse was sold last year, and overlooks beautifully maintained gardens. The elegant townhouses, with their classic cornices and period fireplaces, are now being snapped up by a new generation of well-to- do buyers, including technology tycoons, bankers, and people moving up from London, where property prices are substantially higher than the rest of the country. The market for luxury homes in the area is still booming, with Georgian townhouses continuing to sell for sums pushing the GBP 1million mark. Last year a four-storey home on Royal Circus became the first townhouse in Scotland to sell for a seven-figure sum, well above its GBP 850,000 asking price.

The Gallery of Modern Art began in Inverleith House, a Georgian domestic building. Twenty-five years later it moved to its current home, the former John Watson's School in Belford Road. Fifteen years after that move, the Dean Gallery opened on the other side of the road. It was a former orphanage, while John Watson's was a school for fatherless children. I don't think this legacy of deprivation met by charitable intent has affected the way the galleries have evolved. Nevertheless, neither a Georgian house, nor a Georgian institution would ever be first choice for a gallery of modern art. Indeed, [Stanley Cursiter] wanted a new building. He had a design and even a site in mind. In the late 1970s, when \"dishing the Nats\" became a priority for Westminster in advance of the 1979 referendum, money miraculously became available for Scottish projects. Some was used to build the gloomy Scottish basement for the National Gallery at the Mound. According to the late Colin Thompson, NGS director at the time, there was also money for a new Gallery of Modern Art on Cursiter's chosen site, but the opportunity was missed. So the SNGMA still works in an architectural straitjacket, just as it did when it first opened in the small domestic rooms of Inverleith House. The gallery has always worked in a financial straitjacket, too. In 1938, it would have been possible to form a representative collection of Modernism with limited means. Twenty years later, modern masterpieces had become classics with prices to match. Nevertheless, some important early acquisitions were made, the small but lovely Cubist painting The Candlestick by Braque, bought in 1976, for instance, and Picasso's still-life with fish, Les Soles, bought in 1967. Less conventional was the purchase of pictures such as Otto Dix's Girl on a Fur in 1980 and, in the same year, Roy Lichtenstein's Pop masterpiece In the Car. Nevertheless, the SNGMA might have remained a very poor relation of other galleries of the kind, if it had not been for the acquisition of Eduardo Paolozzi's studio, then of the Keiller and Penrose collections, and more recently of Anthony d'Offay's collection. With Paolozzi's gift, the SNGMA became at a stroke the central collection for one of the most significant artists to come out of Scotland in the last century. Closely linked, the Penrose and Keiller collections gave the gallery a major body of Surrealist work, while the d'Offay collection includes some of the most celebrated, if not necessarily the best, art of the past 40 years.