What exactly is it about America that has inspired such creativity and artistry among so many of its citizens of Scottish ancestry? Could it be the sheer, breathtaking size of the country, its abundant resources and the many opportunities these present? Or is it the extraordinary diversity of landscape and climate, "the prodigious variety of scenes" that so astounded Alexis de Tocqueville?

On the West Coast alone, one finds "from north to south, virgin forest falling away to the green, damp England of Oregon, and down through all the various landscapes of California – Switzerland and Burgundy and Yorkshire and Scotland and Spain – to the desert and the balmy seashore of Lower California," enthused Alistair Cooke in America.* While successive waves of immigrants found themselves on a new and distant continent, there was always much to recall the old; much that was familiar, comfortable and reassuring.

So, was it the lure and challenge of a new beginning that stirred "the tenth Muse"? Or was it perhaps exposure to and the influence of people drawn from many different nationalities, cultures and backgrounds? What was the contribution of the sheer personal courage and tenacity of those seeking a new life? And how much of all this stemmed from America, and how much from Scotland?

The Golden Gate Park, one of the most renowned botanical gardens in the world, was one of many monuments to America’s heritage created by Scotland’s sons and daughters. This magnificent 1,017-acre park in San Francisco was a barren, sandy area until the late eighteenth century when John McLaren, a native of historic Bannockburn, Stirlingshire, became park superintendent and set about its transformation.

It was another Scot, Andrew Smith Halladie, who developed the city’s famous cable railway. While he himself was born in London, his father came from Fleming, Dumfriesshire and his mother was from Lockerbie.

The creativity of a number of Americans of Scottish ancestry is perhaps most impressively mirrored in the architecture defining many of the country’s great cities. The numerous prominent architects contributing to its heritage include James Renwick, whose reputation was built on such nineteenth-century monuments as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White, partners of the renowned New York architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White. Among many important commissions, this practice designed the old Madison Square Garden and the Washington Arch.

Artists of Scottish descent have also left a significant mark on America’s cultural legacy. Gilbert Charles Stuart, whose ancestors came from Perth, was America’s leading portrait artist in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Brought up in Newport, he learned some of his artistic techniques from Cosmo Alexander, a visitor from Scotland whom he subsequently accompanied to Edinburgh. Stuart was at that time just sixteen years old. He stayed in Scotland for a year before returning home. Three years later he crossed the Atlantic again to live in London and then in Dublin, before returning definitively to the US in 1793. Of his thousand or so portraits, Gilbert Stuart is particularly well known for his unfinished portrait of George Washington.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who also had Scottish ancestry, is considered by many the most important exponent of impressionism in America. Abandoning early plans to join the army, he went to Paris in 1855 where he studied painting and mixed with French modernists including Gustave Courbet, before finally settling in London some eight years later.

Another important representative of the impressionist movement was Mary Cassatt, the celebrated late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century Pennsylvania-born "painter of modern women"‡. Mary’s father was descended from seventeenth-century French Huguenot immigrants. Her mother, Katherine Kelso Johnstone, boasted Scottish-Irish ancestry.

Cassatt was particularly influential in the development of American modernism and closely involved in the choice of works making up the Havemeyer Collection of modern French art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The museum itself owes much to an American of Scottish descent - John Taylor Johnston, its principal founder and first president.

Born more than half a century after Mary Cassatt, Jackson Pollock, who was also descended from Scots, was one of the founders of abstract expressionism in the early 1940s, and is considered one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century.

Part 2.