The setting for this painting is Stanley Cursiter’s studio at 28 Queen Street, Edinburgh. On the right of the composition the artist is engaged in conversation with his sister while, on the left, his brother-in-law leans towards two of Cursiter’s models. Behind them the lights of Edinburgh’s Georgian ‘New Town’ are visible through an open window. The picture was probably painted in the summer of 1914, when the country was on the brink of the First World War. Nevertheless the painting evokes the relaxed insouciance of the middle classes at what must have been a period of great concern.

Cursiter was brought up in Orkney, a remote group of islands to the north of the Scottish mainland. He trained as a lithographer, but attended evening classes in painting at Edinburgh College of Art, later joining the Society of Scottish Artists. His earliest works were seascapes of Orkney and Shetland, painted in a broadly impressionist style, but he is best known for his portraits. He was inspired by the post-impressionist exhibitions organised in London in 1910 and 1912 by the critic and writer Roger Fry and by the futurist exhibitions, also held in London, devised by Frank Rutter. In 1913 he arranged for works by Henri Matisse (cat.81), Vincent van Gogh, Gino Severini (cat.99), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, John Duncan Fergusson and others to be exhibited in Edinburgh at the annual exhibition of the Scottish Society of Artists.

Briefly inspired by futurist art, he produced his own experimental images of Edinburgh’s Princes Street and the Arts Club before reverting to a more broadly impressionist style comparable with the work of John Singer Sargent and William Orpen. Like Sargent, and Whistler before him, he enjoyed the challenge of painting different tones of white and in 1914 he worked on a related canvas of girls in white dresses set against a window with white curtains. He returned to this theme after the war, producing works such as Chez Nous of 1925 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; PG 2451), a group portrait featuring himself with his wife Phyllis and his model Poppy Low.

At the outbreak of the First World War Cursiter joined up and was sent to the Somme, as a soldier in the First Battalion of the Scottish Rifles (the Cameronians). After a period of illness he enlisted in the Fourth Field Survey Battalion. He joined the National Galleries of Scotland in 1924 as Keeper of the Portrait Gallery, where he redesigned the interior hanging space. He then moved across to the National Gallery and was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland from 1930 to 1948. He established the conservation department and was influential in the campaign to create the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He played an important role in introducing Post-Impressionism to Scotland and encouraged the artists who came to be known as the Scottish Colourists by arranging solo exhibitions of the work of John Duncan Fergusson, Samuel John Peploe and Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell. In 1948 he was appointed His Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland.

This text was originally published in Facing the World: Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, Edinburgh, 2016.