The four early 20th century Scottish painters, known as the Scottish Colourists, were largely forgotten in England and further afield until recent times, when Peploe's A Girl in White was sold at auction for the largest sum of money of any 20th century British work. The Colourists spent their formative years in Paris at the time of the great exhibitions devoted to Whistler, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Encountering at first hand the Fauve and Cubist works of Matisse and Picasso, they brought back to Scotland the first truly modern painting to be seen in Britain this century.;This illustrated study considers the work of all four painters, confirms their reputation and reassesses the importance of their art in the context of 20th century British painting.