William McTaggart began work on The Emigrants in 1883.

Richard Humphreys/Christine Riding/David Dimbleby

RH: He's painting a particular spot and actually adds the figures and the narrative of this later on about 5 or 6 years later in the late 1880s probably because er... that would have helped sell it, you know it had a nice landscape, but some figures with some sort of story and perhaps something a little bit emotional like this would have made it a more attractive prospect and of course being a Scot and having had a sister who had emigrated with her husband, you know, it did mean something to him other than this simply possibly commercial thought that it might have

CR: What McTaggart does in the 1880s is not produce a painting which keys into what at this point would have been a rather clichéd way of painting the Highlands that is the sort of stormy skies the rugged landscape the stag running across at this point rather extremely clichéd ways of viewing the landscape but rather employing a very impressionistic much freer way of painting the landscape

DD: His grandson showed the picture many years later to a French critic I think it was who was looking at it you see, and he asked when McTaggart died and when he was told he said ' mon dieu, c'est impossible' he assumed that McTaggart had studied the Impressionists, that he painted like this because he knew how the Impressionist painted and it wasn't true; he was a precursor of the Impressionists.