This work is part of a series of portraits of Scottish poets commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council. At this time in Scotland there existed an outstanding generation of poets. Christopher Murray Grieve was one of the most important literary figures of twentieth-century Scotland, now recognised as the principal force of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. Is a study for the much larger painting ‘Hugh MacDiarmid (Hymn to Lenin)’ which shows the poet against a landscape that Moffat saw as symbolising Scotland. The figures include Lenin, Mayakovsky and the Scottish Socialist Revolutionary, John MacLean. Grieve had strong political beliefs and he co-founded the National Party of Scotland, today’s SNP.