Something new under the sun

EDINBURGH is overcast and clammy and there's a distinct threat of thunder, but inside the National Gallery of Scotland it seems the storm may already have struck. The walls – usually pale and rather douce – have been painted a deep "aubergine" purple, a buttery yellow and a vivid drawing room red.

On 18 July, the elegant neoclassical building on the Mound will open its doors for The Discovery Of Spain, a major exhibition that charts the influence of Spanish art on British artists and collectors from the early years of the 19th century to the most turbulent period of the 20th.

At the moment, though, the exhibition is in its early stages of the hang. Tables are laid with plans, crates await unpacking, the lights are low and there's a sense of quiet purpose. Picking his way through this well-ordered tempest is Christopher Baker, deputy director of the National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition, he says, pits "the insider view of Spain against the outsider, the romantic view", and he believes we can learn from both.

The outside view of Spain conditioned not only the works that were made there by British artists, which often emphasised Spain as a place of picturesque dress and florid social custom, but also how Spanish works were received at home. British artists conditioned by the taste first for Italian and later French art viewed Spanish art as a minor tributary in the great flow of European culture.

Beside these cultural assumptions were wider prejudices about Spain as superstitious and primitive and views of its landscape as an irredeemably hostile one. One of the great Spanish pictures in British hands, Zurburan's St Francis In Meditation (1635), an image of the cowled saint contemplating death in near darkness, was the subject of public outrage when it was acquired for the National Gallery in London in 1853.

Yet underlying this history of exoticism and misunderstanding was a slowly developing understanding of Spanish society and culture. An outwardness and a religious tolerance for Spain's Catholic present and Islamic past ran counter to the prevailing climates at home.

Pioneer collectors like Sir John Stirling Maxwell of Glasgow's Pollok estate led the way. Paintings by Murillo, Zurbaran, El Greco and Velazquez found themselves in British collections. Owen Jones in The Grammar Of Ornament did much to champion the legacy of Moorish Spain and the exquisite Islamic art of Seville and Granada. By the close of the 19th century artists such as Whistler were worshipping at the altar of Velazquez.

What will be clear from the outset of the exhibition is that it was not the pursuit of culture, not early tourism or conventional trade that brought Britons close to the art of Spain. It was the brutal pragmatism of armed conflict. In the years 1807 to 1814, Britain found itself an unlikely ally of Spain and Portugal against Napoleon in the Peninsular War. One of the earliest and most significant British collections of Spanish art fell into the hands of the Duke of Wellington, when the Spanish regime recovered a cache of art that had been acquired by Napoleon's brother Joseph.

The Discovery Of Spain therefore begins with that war and ends with another, the Spanish Civil War. The opening images are from that greatest of Spanish artists Goya and with one of the bleakest set of images in Western art: the Disasters Of War.

These images tell a story of the "omnipresent violence" and "virtuoso sadism" of conflict, where both the invading armies and the resisting fighters are locked in a cycle of astonishing brutality, often against civilians.

This then is the bleak insider view of Spain, based on reportage, eye witness experience and, to a certain extent, grim imaginings far from the front line. We recognise these images now for their fearlessness, the strength of their message, but also for their cinematic narratives.

Spain after its resistance to Napoleon was not a place of recovery, peace or order. Instead it was a weak and divided state subject to further conflict and the bitter political legacies of war. Goya left the country for France returning briefly for the last time to Madrid in 1827.

That September, Goya passed through the small French town of Bayonne. Within days coming the opposite way was a Scot, the artist David Wilkie, who had made his name with another far more anodyne image of war. His painting The Chelsea Pensioners showed the moment when the news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo reached home.

The tension between the inside view and the outside view will be immediately apparent to exhibition visitors. Disasters will share a room with Wilkie's famous painting of the Peninsular War, The Defence Of Saragossa. Goya portrayed the siege of Saragossa as brave but squalid; its heroine, the Maid of Saragossa, fires a cannon by trampling the bodies of dead comrades underfoot. In Wilkie's interpretation she is bonnie and apparently little troubled by the mayhem.

Whilst constantly referring to this dualism, the exhibition is an excuse to bring together some fabulous paintings in British collections. It contextualises some of the works we already know and love, such as our own Velazquez of An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, but also showcases some more unusual treasures such as four of Zurbaran's little known symbolic portraits of the 12 Tribes Of Israel From Bishop Auckland.

Of course great Spanish art has continued to inspire. The Chapman Brothers have notoriously used Goya as a central source in their work, going so far as to purchase and then deface a set of the Disasters Of War. More lyrically the contemporary Scottish painter Alison Watt found herself irresistibly drawn to Zurbaran's St Francis when she was appointed painter in residence at London's National Gallery. As part of the Discovery of Spain she will give a talk on why this single artwork has become an abiding pre-occupation and the subject of her National Gallery show last year.

"I've become obsessed with the picture," she said on the eve of her opening in 2008. "And a huge part of that painting is the open mouth; it is the key to the painting, along with the gaping hood, the bowl, the barely visible stigmata on the back of the hand. In a sense, negative spaces are the subject of that picture, that strange darkness, and the apertures have become the focus."

The Discovery Of Spain reads rather like Watt's individual fascination. Spain was for many Britons a kind of empty and mysterious space on which to project their own ideas. Eventually though many of them found themselves far more directly familiar with the real place.

"You can see it as early as Wilkie," says Baker. "It starts with a kind of fascination. Later you get understanding, respect, a real sense of identity with ordinary Spanish people."

The Discovery of Spain, British Artists and Collectors Goya to Picasso, is at the National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, 18 July-11 October. Scotland on Sunday is proud to be the media partner of this major exhibition