Best in show | Rain on Princes Street, 1913, by Stanley Cursiter

“This is something of a historical document as well as a groundbreaking painting. While it’s recognisable as the famous thoroughfare, it shows elements of Edinburgh that are no longer there. For example, the lamp standards were replaced during the first world war, shortly after Cursiter painted them.

There are also glimpses of features from the exterior of the Life Association building, which was demolished in the 1970s and replaced by shops. Cursiter used to work in graphic design and you can see that influence at work; he experiments with pattern and lines to provide a sense of movement. 

He places the viewer against the flow of the crowd, so our eyes scan the mass of incomplete umbrellas and unfinished faces. It’s wet and grey, and the refracted glow of the streetlights that look like flower heads adds to the drama.

With such works Cursiter was one of the first artists in Britain to explore Italian futurism, a movement dedicated to capturing the dynamism of the modern world.

The artist – who later became the director of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) – underwent his own transformation over the years; he left experimentation behind and became known as a formal landscape and portrait painter.

In the exhibition, this picture hangs alongside one of his later works, a representational view of his native Orkney, with beautiful clouds and piercing sunlight.

The diversity of work produced by artists is a key theme in the show. There are similarly contrasting pieces by William Johnstone, who taught in London for many years and was originally known for his abstract art.

While many exhibitions suppose people know something about art history, we have dropped all the “isms” in our descriptions of the works to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. With Cursiter, for example, we don’t mention the F-word – futurism – as we are trying not to bamboozle people who just like to look at paintings. Instead, we focus on the artists’ inspirations and where they were in their lives at the time of the work.

This picture has been at the McManus since the mid-1970s, when a curator contacted senior figures in Scottish art and asked if they could supply experimental work to plug a gap in the museum’s 20th-century collection.

When the McManus was closed for refurbishment a few years ago, this piece featured in an NGS exhibition, which ended up in London. 

There, a member of the public developed an appreciation of it and wrote to us asking for an image. When this show began, there he was, waiting for the doors to open, having come from London to see his favourite painting again.”