Providing new evidence on the life and times of this Scottish painter, Andrew McPherson shows Gillies to be a modernist thinker. Including paintings never seen before, he reappraises his creative output, including the relationship of portraiture to still life, placing him firmly within not only a Scottish context but a British and European one too.

Andrew McPherson has been researching the life, times and works of William Gillies for over twenty years. He has rethought the formative influence of his art of two World Wars, gender inequalities and the modernist crisis of meaning and belief.