Had the Union of the Crowns not taken place in 1603, it is possible that the art of painting might have developed much earlier than it did. No doubt that event brought healing to the long open sore caused and inflamed by kingly ambitions and national animosities, but it removed the Court to London, and with that some of the greatest nobles, while the change in the religion of the ruling house from Presbyterianism to Episcopacy, which followed, led to the Covenants and the religious persecution, and drove the iron of ascetism into the souls of those classes from whom artists mostly spring. Yet the logical rigidity of the Calvinistic spirit, while taking much of the joy out of life and opposing its manifestation in art, had certain compensating advantages. Disciplining the mind, quickening the reasoning powers, and cultivating that grasp of essentials which makes for success in almost any pursuit, and not least in art, it helped very largely to make the Scot what he is. During the peaceful years which immediately followed the Union, there was considerable activity in the building of country residences. Now that the country was more settled these were less castles than mansions, and the larger and better lighted apartments possible led to a good deal of elaborate decoration. Of this Pinkie House (1613) with its painted gallery is perhaps the most celebrated example. It is difficult, however, to determine how much of this kind of work was done by foreign, how much by native craftsmen, and as it seems to have exerted little influence upon the one or two picture-painters who emerged during the seventeenth century, one need not discuss the probabilities. So far as has been discovered, the only link between this phase of art and the other consists of the fact that George Jamesone (1598?-1644), the first clearly recognisable Scottish artist, was apprenticed in 1612 to one John Andersone "paynter" in Edinburgh, whose decoration in Gordon Castle is mentioned by an old chronicler. As might be expected in the circumstances the "Scottish Van Dyck," as he is fondly called, was a portrait-painter. He was followed by a few others, such as the Scougall family, Aikman Marshall, Wait, and the two Alexanders, who, although neither so accomplished nor so much appreciated as their precursor, form a never quite broken succession of portraitists between him and Allan Ramsay (1713-84) in whose work art in Scotland took a great step forward.[1] A few of Ramsay's predecessors had succeeded in supplementing the meagre instruction--if any thing that existed could be dignified by that name--to be obtained in Scotland by a visit to the Low Countries or Italy, but Ramsay was the first to obtain a sound technical training. The author of "The Gentle Shepherd," to whom Edinburgh was indebted for its first circulating library and its first play-house, encouraged his son's bent for art, and after some preliminary study in London, Allan _fils_ was