Forty years ago, deep in the City of London, David Donald, a director of the venerable merchant bank Robert Fleming Holdings, suggested that the old place was looking a bit dreary. Some art, it was decided, would brighten the place up.

Since the bank’s eponymous founder had been born in Dundee in 1845, the directors decided that a Scottish theme would be appropriate.

In 1968, armed with what would be considered today a very modest budget and a remit to buy work by Scottish artists or depicting Scottish subjects, the directors of Fleming unwittingly started one of the most important collections in the world. For the kind of prices that today’s graduates charge at their degree shows, Donald went to auction houses and bought important works by the Scottish impressionist William McTaggart, the Glasgow Boys group of the 1880s and 1890s, and the four artists who comprised the Scottish colourists of the 1920s and 1930s.

In the era of pop art, nobody was much interested in Victorian landscapes or Scottish historical subjects by forgotten painters. Among a raft of gems, Donald snapped up two iconic images of the Highland clearances: Lochaber No More by John Watson Nicol, and Thomas Faed’s The Last of the Clan.

Four decades later, it is hard to tell whether merchant banking or the art world has undergone bigger changes. Fleming was bought by Chase Manhattan in 2000. The art collection was bought by the Fleming family for its market value, then immediately gifted to a charitable foundation endowed by the family.

Now comfortably settled into its own smart premises in Mayfair, the Fleming Collection continues to acquire Scottish art. Selina Skipwith, the curator, now competes with museums and galleries for the choicest works. But the relationship is a friendly one and Skipwith has invited many of these rivals to participate in the gallery’s 40th anniversary exhibition. Inspired: 40 Years of Collecting Scottish Art is the result of allowing personalities from television and the arts to select a favourite painting from the collection.

Some of the selections have surprised Skipwith, who is familiar with every sketch and miniature in the collection. Michael Palin, who made programmes about Anne Redpath and the Colourists as part of his BBC series Palin on Art, chose an atmospheric but little known painting by Charles Lees, Skaters on Duddingston Loch, Edinburgh, which could be the long-lens version of Henry Raeburn’s famous portrait of the Rev Robert Walker skating on the very same loch.

“The movements of the skaters, both fluent and clumsy, have a feeling of celebration and vitality,” says the former Monty Python star. “But what gives the picture a magical quality is the play of moonlight on the ice and the snow-covered banks of the loch.”

Susanna Beaumont, director of Edinburgh’s DoggerFisher gallery, which looks after Nathan Coley, chose Spanish Elegy by the St Andrews-born abstract artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Barns-Graham, now in her nineties, is “a grand old dame of Scottish art”, says Skipworth. “Not what I would have expected Susannah to choose at all.” For Beaumont, “the colour, the brush strokes, the words ‘elegy’ and ‘Spanish’ all combine to make this painting hugely beautiful and moving”.

Some people knew exactly what they wanted straight away — it was not a huge surprise when Guy Peploe, director of the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, chose Lady in a White Dress by his Colourist grandfather, Samuel Peploe.

The painter and printmaker Dame Elizabeth Blackadder went for Anstruther by Sir William Gillies. “A small canvas, but it says everything,” she says. “The rocks, the walls, houses, sea and sky all have a completeness. Everything has been said about this corner of a Fife harbour with the movement of the sea and the light.”

John Houston, her husband and a fellow painter, selected the Barley Field, Sandy Dean, a large McTaggart oil. “You can see how McTaggart influenced his [Houston’s] working style,” says Skipwith.

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