For those who enjoy a challenging book this one hits the mark perfectly. Eloquently written, intellectually rigorous, impeccably researched, the challenge is posed by its scope. The timespan encompasses a period of 65,000 years or thereabouts, assuming we accept that the first surviving ‘British’ artwork is an impression of a horse’s head scratched on a bone found in a Derbyshire cave. From there we are taken on a tour of interesting archaeological crafted artefacts until finally coming across what we might recognise as the first consciously created works of art in a culturally orthodox sense – illuminated books and manuscripts.

These can be staggeringly beautiful, but unless I’m missing something subtle to the point of ineffability this writer, at least, can’t say he’s ever found the Chi-Roh page from the 8th century Book of Kells ‘comical’, as Mr Grosvenor apparently does. True, there is a male head entwined in its exotic arabesques, but is this a cause of mirth? There are also some weird and wonderful imaginary creatures in medieval bestiaries which might raise a smile or two, but few of us, I suspect, would choose to conflate them with the contents of such great devotionals as The Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels.

From there we proceed to images which begin to correspond with our own notions of what actually constitutes a work of art, at least in the realm of painting. The frontispiece of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, dating from 934, is a double portrait of King Aethelstan and the eponymous saint, and is even set within the painted suggestion of a frame.

This soon takes us into the more familiar territory of the framed portrait, the predominant format preferred by British patrons, whose interests were not so much artistic, as tied up with status and power. This was particularly the case after the Norman invasion, when a new class system was emerging and family dynasties were being established. The function of a portrait was to assert legitimacy amongst one’s contemporaries, and to remind one’s descendants that the family legacy must always be cherished. Those with the means of acquiring portraits were more concerned that the artist should deliver a ‘good likeness’ rather than impress with flair and creativity.

Thanks to the depredations of the reformation in the mid-16th century it was the destruction of art, rather than its cultivation, which led to its rapid decline as gangs of iconoclasts swept through the ecclesiastical estate. Images, graven and otherwise, were strictly outlawed. Statues of the saints were particularly excoriated. The effigy of St Giles was ‘drowned’ in Edinburgh’s Nor Loch, then, just to make sure, ceremonially burnt on a pyre.

Once the kirk-wreckers and monastery dissolvers had done their worst a taste for the artistic slowly re-established itself, though almost entirely in a secular context. Painted ceilings, their designs often based on Flemish pattern books, became popular with the merchant classes, while in 1622 Charles 1st commissioned Peter Paul Rubens to paint the spectacular ceiling of the Banqueting Hall. Portraiture was soon back in vogue, though a shortage of artists and craftsmen with the necessary skills resulted in the slack being taken up by a flood of continental artists both north and south of the border. For example the Flemish painter Paul van Somer, much employed as a royal portraitist, had a wealthy clientele throughout Britain, including the jeweller and philanthropist George Heriot.

It wasn’t all down to a paucity of local talent. For the rich wool merchants of rural England the Netherlandish school was the fashionable choice, as illustrated in the book by a spectacular Hans Memling triptych of 1478. Half a century later, Mr Grosvenor tells us, Hans Holbein arrived to “help save art from its most destructive moment yet”. We continued to depend largely on continental portraitists, their dominance lasting, with a few exceptions, until the era of Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) who is dealt with at length by the author.

If all this continentalism rather begs the question of what, exactly, British art actually is, we soon find ourselves confronted by another conundrum – the divergence between the art of England and that of Scotland which – increasingly – were becoming distinctive schools. The separation was far from absolute. The London-born Baroque portraitist John Michael Wright, who would occasionally describe himself as ‘Scottish’ in documents, straddles the border insofar as he was a pupil of the eminent Edinburgh painter, George Jamesone, before moving back to London.

This digression would become even more marked in the 18th century, when Scotland’s aspiring artists would head for Rome in significant numbers to study at the Accademia di San Luca. There, Scottish students at times outnumbered all other nationalities other than Italians. There were also many opportunities to train at home. An ‘Academy of St Luke’ was established in Edinburgh in 1729, the Foulis Academy, established by two brother printers, was founded in Glasgow in 1754. Finally, in 1760, The Trustees Drawing Academy was established in Edinburgh, financed by the revenues of forfeited Jacobite Estates – a curious foretaste of Keynesian economics! Others trained within the ‘atelier’ tradition under, for example, the landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth.

Scotland’s arts, in general, went through something of a golden age in the second half of the 18th century, one of the most outstanding symbols of the age being Alan Ramsay’s portrait of David Hume, though there were many equally inspiring symbols – Nasmyth’s portrait of Robert Burns, or Raeburn’s Sir John and Lady Clerk of Penicuik being other examples. As a branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, the visual arts were further boosted by the rise of neoclassicism. All those grand Augustan drawing rooms, after all, were in need of good paintings.

The perception that Scottish art was in a category of its own would eventually be promulgated in books which sought to persuade their readers that there was, indeed, a quite specific and identifiable School of Scottish Art. Sir James Caw’s Scottish Painting Past and Present: 1620-1908, was the first one of significance, and indeed found worthy of reprinting in 1975.

With an upsurge in interest in Scottish art by mid-century more books were to follow. Scottish Art to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, by Orcadian artist Stanley Cursiter, who succeeded Sir James Caw as director of the National Gallery of Scotland, was written to appeal to a broad market, schoolchildren included. Duncan Macmillan’s Scottish Art: 1460-1990 might have been the final scholarly word on the subject, but there was more to come. Thirty years later the artist Lachlan Goudie followed up his TV series The Story of Scottish Art with a lavishly illustrated book. The starting point, in that case, was 3000 BC.

A recurring problem for those of us with a close interest in the history of Scottish art is one of definition. What, exactly, is a Scottish artist? The variables can be endless. Joan Eardley whose depictions of Townhead Keelies and the dramatic landscapes of Catterline, near Stonehaven, made her famous, was born and brought up in Sussex, for example. How should she be classified? Likewise Cambridge-born Jenny Saville, who spent four years studying at the Glasgow School of Art under Sandy Moffat, but otherwise has nothing of Scotland in her work. And what of Edinburgh-born Peter Doig, whose paintings command stratospheric prices (Swamped, his depiction of a canoe, sold at auction for just under £30 million in 2021). He studied at St Martin’s School and Chelsea College, lives mostly in Trinidad, and is merely Scottish by birth.

The Invention of British Art makes a few brief references to Scotland, though it adopts Allan Ramsay, Painter in Ordinary to George 111rd, as a quintessentially British artist, which indeed he was, rather like the brothers Adam, whose neoclassicism was all the rage on both sides of the border for over half a century.

On the whole, however, this is a book (and, for sure, a very informative and elegantly written book) on English art, with Scotland being afforded a few brief ‘blink and you miss them’ cameo roles. It can only leave the reader – especially the Scottish reader – contemplating an uneasy question. Is there really such a thing as British Art?

The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor. Published by Elliott & Thompson, 384pp, £40.