uncan MacMillan is Professor Emeritus of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh, and former Curator of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Between 2008 and 2012 he was curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Scottish Art 1460-1990 has been called "perhaps the definitive statement on Scottish paintings" by Frommers Guides. According to Cairns Craig, the book views Scottish art as emanating from public art practices of the Protestant Reformation.[5] The Times Literary Supplement considered that Macmillan was excellent on the Renaissance but later prone to "a certain unevenness". Nonetheless, the "TLS" praised his "intellectual underpinning" and treatments of William Quiller Orchardson and William McTaggart.[6] In 1991 this book won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award.

Will Maclean is one of the outstanding artists of his generation in Scotland. Born in Inverness in 1941, Maclean studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and spent a year at the British School at Rome under a Gray's Travelling Scholarship. In 1981 he took up a lecturing post at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, and is now Emeritus Professor of Fine Art. He was elected to the RSA in 1991. His work is in public collections including the Arts Council; The British Museum; Dundee and Glasgow City Art Galleries; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture; the McMaster Museum, Canada; and Yale Centre for British Art, Newhaven, USA.