For 200 years, we’ve been collecting, preserving and celebrating the work of artists and architects connected to Scotland. From the Academy’s founding in 1826 to the present day, the RSA Collection has grown alongside the changing landscape of Scottish art.
Today, the collection holds more than 11,000 artworks, alongside an extensive archive and library. At its heart is the Diploma Collection, which has been built through Academicians presenting a work to the Academy following their election.
To coincide with 200 Years, our current exhibition celebrating two centuries of Scottish art, we’re taking a journey through the RSA Collection. We’ve selected two works from each decade that were acquired by the Academy at the time to reflect on the work, people and ideas that have shaped the RSA.
1826 – 1836
Thomas Hamilton RSA, Royal High School, c.1825 - c.1831
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1831
This watercolour drawing is part of the series of drawings that Thomas Hamilton made for the new Royal High School on the south side of Calton Hill. It was the first architectural drawing to enter the collections, by the lone architect amongst the Academy’s founding members.
Sir John Steell RSA, David Scott, c.1831 - c.1839
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1831
This was one of the first sculptures to enter the Academy’s Diploma Collection. Steell was a young artist at the time he created this flourishing likeness of his artist friend David Scott RSA in the late classical style. It was inspired by The Dying Alexander in the Vatican, which was widely known through plaster casts and used as an exemplar and teaching aid in art academies.
1836 – 1846
Sir David Wilkie HRSA, Stag hunt in the Highlands, c.1804 - c.1841
Acquisition: Sir David Wilkie studio sale, 1842
This work was accessioned into the RSA Collection as being by Thomas Duncan RSA, but no finished painting with such a subject was known from Duncan's hand. Our Documentation Officer, Robin H. Rodger, subsequently identified the work as being a sketch by Sir David Wilkie HRSA purchased from his Studio Sale in 1842, on the evidence of a receipt in the RSA Vouchers Collection.
After Sir George Harvey PPRSA, Quitting the Manse, 1838
Acquisition: Gift from Sir Francis Graham Moon, 1839
The RSA’s collection of nineteenth century prints and copy engravings after significant Scottish paintings is amongst the most important in the country. It was enhanced by major gifts such as that from English print seller and Royal Academician Sir Francis Graham Moon.
1846 – 1856
David Octavius Hill RSA and Robert Adamson, The Royal Institution with the Castle in the background, c.1843 - c.1848
Acquisition: Gift from David Octavius Hill RSA, 1852
D O Hill was the RSA’s longest serving Secretary and is recognised as the father of Scottish photography. He pioneered the medium in Scotland with the chemist Robert Adamson and it is unlikely there would be any early photography in the RSA collections if it wasn’t for Hill.
William Etty HRSA, Venus of Urbino, 1823
Acquisition: Purchase, the Trustees of the late William Etty RA HRSA, 1853
This work is a life-size copy, painted in-situ from Titian's original oil painting in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
1856 – 1866
Waller Hugh Paton RSA, Lamlash Bay, 1865
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1865
Throughout his adult life, Paton kept a series of detailed notebooks in which he recorded his artworks. The entries often include small but accurate watercolour sketches of each work, its medium, the circumstances under which it was painted, where it was exhibited, and its sale price. This painting was created from a series of sketches made at Lamlash on the Isle of Arran off the west Coast of Scotland during 1864.
Sir Joseph Noel Paton RSA and William Henry Simmons, Hesperus the Evening Star, 1863
Acquisition: Gift from Thomas Alexander Hill, 1866
1866 – 1876
Samuel Bough RSA, View of Edinburgh from Bonnington, 1875
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1875
John Dick Peddie RSA, Suggestions for the Improvement of Edinburgh, c.1870
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1871
Several architectural submissions to the Diploma Collection relate to schemes that were never realised. This ambitious plan for Waverley Market would certainly have changed the makeup of Edinburgh’s iconic centre.
1876 – 1886
Elizabeth Maria Ouchterlony, St Bernard’s Well, c.1800 - c.1809
Acquisition: Miss Mary Ann Cumming bequest, 1886
St Bernard’s Well was a favourite location for nineteenth century painters seeking the picturesque and romantic. A talented but forgotten painter of the period, Elizabeth Ouchterlony’s identity was hidden in our records, and she was known only as Mrs Cumming, until RSA Residencies for Scotland artist Victoria Bernie revealed her during her Residency at the collections in 2019.
William Beattie Brown, Coire na Faireamh in Applecross Deer Forrest Ross-shire, c.1883 - c.1884
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1884
A lone deer makes symbolic reference to the places of the clearances in this evocative romantic landscape, which Beattie Brown selected as his Diploma Work.
1886 – 1896
Sir William Allan PPRSA, Preparatory study, c.1805 - c.1815
Acquisition: Purchase, William Brown, 1889
This is one of 27 drawings pasted into an album. 18 of these can be directly linked to figures or details in Allan’s famous 1815 oil painting, Circassian Captives. Sketchbooks and albums are a major part of the RSA collections and help reveal artistic practice and thinking. A recent gift from the studio of David Michie RSA contains no fewer than 135 sketchbooks.
Francis Grose, Ruined Chapel on the Beach at North Berwick, 1789
Acquisition: Purchase, Richard Cameron, 1888
Francis Grose was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. In 1788 he first toured Scotland to produce The Antiquities of Scotland, copies of which are in the RSA library. It was on the second of these tours, in 1789, that he met and formed a friendship with the poet Robert Burns.
1896 – 1906
George Henry RSA, The Grey Hat, c.1902
Acquisition: RSA Diploma Collection Deposit, 1902
The turn of the century saw the revolutionary Glasgow Boys elected to the Academy, in no small part due to the influence and Presidency of Sir James Guthrie. Portraits are a popular subject in the Diploma Collection, and this is one of the finest of the period.
Andrew Gamley, L'Enfance de Sainte Genevieve, c.1904
Acquisition: Purchase, Andrew Gamley, 1905
This work is a copy of one of the paintings from the scheme in the Pantheon in Paris by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Andrew Gamley was the first recipient of the RSA Carnegie Scholarship, which he used to travel to Paris in 1904.
1906 – 1916
Charles Cockerell, Proposed National Memorial, Calton Hill - Longitudinal Section, c.1822
Acquisition: Gift from Anna Cockerell, 1909
Over the years, many schemes to complete the monument at Calton Hill have been proposed. After it was left unfinished by 1829 it came to be known as Edinburgh’s Disgrace. This is one of a series of drawings gifted to the RSA, which show Cockerell’s ambitious vision for the monument.
William McTaggart RSA, A Shingly Shore, 1904
Acquisition: John Politachi bequest, 1914
The father of modern Scottish painting, no list is complete without a seascape by William McTaggart. This painting was one of thirty-six paintings shown at Aitken Dott, The Scottish Gallery, 26 Castle Street, Edinburgh in the Spring of 1907.
1916 – 1926
Amelia Robertson Paton, Mrs A Burns Shand, c.1864 - c.1865
Acquisition: Gift from Mrs S Peel, 1918
The sister of Joseph Noel and Waller Hugh Paton and the wife of D O Hill, Amelia Paton was a significant sculptor whose talent ranks her amongst the best in Scotland at the time.
William Walls, In the Arena, c.1922
Acquisition: Purchase, Thorburn Ross Memorial Fund, 1922
The first 100 years of the RSA Collection tells a story of changing artistic styles and the growing ambitions of the Academy. By 1926, the collection was still taking shape, with another century of artists yet to come. In our next post, we'll explore 1926 to the present day and reflect on how the collection continued to evolve.
About the author
Sandy Wood
Sandy Wood is Head of Collections at the RSA. He is responsible for the management, care of, and access to the RSA’s uniquely formed collection, Recognised as a collection of National Significance to Scotland.
Sandy joined the RSA in 2003 after graduating in Fine Art from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, later completing a Masters in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Of particular interest to him are the stories woven between historic and contemporary practice and practitioners, artistic lineage and legacy, and the revealing of art through process and artistic voice.
