Home for brave art

Last year, when old-style British bank Flemings (founded 1843) was sold to American giant Chase Manhattan for £4.75 billion, voices of doom could be heard from the art world. The fear was that with the bank would vanish the most important private collection of Scottish art, created in just 33 years.In fact, that turned out to be an exaggeration: although some of the works are indeed being sold, the collection has been protected by being placed in the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, and prepared for public exposure in a new London gallery.

Today, around 100 paintings from the 1,000-strong collection will be auctioned by Christie's, and are expected to fetch up to £1 million. They include some of the most important names in Scottish painting, from Colourists such as FCB Cadell and SJ Peploe, to Anne Redpath and Elizabeth Blackadder. The first of two planned sales (the second takes place in March next year), it is part of a programme of cataloguing and rationalisation.

The Fleming Collection gallery is housed in Berkeley Street, on two floors of the family's new bank, Fleming Family and Partners. It will open in January with a show of the turn-of-the-20th-century Glasgow Boys (George Henry, John Lavery, Arthur Melville and James Paterson). And with each subsequent show, the various periods of post-Union Scottish art will be revealed, from classic melancholy works, such as Thomas Faed's Last of the Clan (springing out of the Highland clearances) through the Scottish Colourists, to the figurative revival and new Glasgow Boys of the Eighties.

The collection was started for entirely pragmatic reasons only fairly recently. When the bank moved London premises in 1968, one of the then directors, David Donald, had an urge to decorate the place himself. The board couldn't see anything wrong with his idea of buying paintings and he was given just one condition: because the family behind the bank was Scottish, the art inside it should be too. It was taken for granted that Donald would be thrifty, and indeed few Scottish painters were at the time sufficiently revered to be expensive. As it turned out, though, Donald displayed an eye for a good chance, which might have put a smile on even the shrewd face of the bank's 19th century founder, Robert Fleming - known in financial lore as "Scotland's Dick Whittington". (Later family members included the travel writer Peter Fleming and his brother Ian, the creator of 007.) By the Eighties, the bank had expanded, and so had the collection; paintings were dispersed to decorate Flemings offices around the world.

After David Donald's death in 1985, the collection's new curators, Robin Fleming and Bill Smith, discovered that it was boom-time for new Scottish art, and picked up the likes of Stephen Conroy, Jack Vetriano and Alison Watt nice and early - and cheap. It gradually dawned on directors of the bank that they had an unprecedented body of work, worth an unexpected amount of money, on their hands. After Flemings was sold the Scottish Press made energetic enquiries to see whether the Edinburgh parliament would do its duty and buy back all its paintings for the nation. But the rather more imaginative plans were already under way from within the family.

The Fleming collection is now being dubbed a "Scottish Embassy of Art" in London. It makes for good knockabout arguments after an unhappy period in which the idea of a national gallery in Scotland itself, dedicated solely to Scottish art, has floundered.

There have been a few mutterings that the collection should have been housed in Scotland. But most experts agree that there is a distinct advantage to be gained from having the work shown off, abroad so to speak, in London, at a time when its value has never been higher. "There is a growing awareness that the socalled national collections of British art in England are really just English art," says Selina Skipwith, curator of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. "They don't have great holdings of Irish, Scottish and Welsh collections."

Of course, the freedom of private patronage lies in not having to justify oneself in national or even art-critical terms. It was family history and personal taste that created the Fleming Collection. Often, that, is how taste is made. After all, where would Brit Art be now if it weren't for the personal taste of Charles Saatchi? The Scottish Sale at Christie's takes place today at the Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh, with a live link-up to Christie's King Street, W1. Enquiries: 020 7389 2506; (Edinburgh 0131 220 6756).

The Fleming Collection opens to the public in January, at 13 Berkeley Street, W1.