In all of his portraiture, Moffat aims to find a balance between emotional expression and compositional order. Over the last 50 years or so, almost single-handed, he has upheld the importance of modern portraiture in Scotland. A determined champion and outstanding practitioner of modern portrait painting, he has produced a body of work not only of high artistic quality, but also of national and historical importance. BILL HAREI am a poet but Im attracted to clarity, to clear, sparse detail. Muriel Spark was writing about her own prose style but she might equally have been describing the art of Alexander Moffat who was commissioned to paint her portrait in 1984A Companion Guide to the Scottish National Portrait GalleryMoffats portrait started from studies done in MacDiarmids home shortly before his death, but developed into something more complex: a likeness that is also an account of him as a thinker and worker. NORBERT LYNTON,Picturing People: British figurative art since 1945