The scope of the exhibition George Heriot: Painter of the Canadas is much broader than the title suggests, exploring as it does, in visual terms, the whole life and work of a man whose contribution to the art of painting in watercolour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has not been appreciated before. Heriot was essentially a topographical landscape painter who possessed a marvellous sense of nature’s particularity. In his maturity he was able to capture with astonishing swiftness and remarkable ease the essence of a landscape portrait. Yet, in his encounters with landscape, the ‘facts’ of nature seldom obtrude; they serve only to stimulate. Sustain and extend a vision. It is the blending of factual and visionary experience that characterizes the best of Heriot’s art and reveals to us with greatest acuity, the sensitivity and depth of his inner self.