A little goose girl guides her flock, another girl stops cutting cabbages in a wintry field to watch as we pass, and Old Willie the farm labourer and village worthy from Kirkcudbright stands, impassive. Meanwhile, a tennis party is caught mid-shot on a sunshine dappled afternoon, and Scottish landscapes, Brig o’ Turk or Galloway or Glencairn, announce autumn in their own distinctive ways.

These paintings by, respectively, James Guthrie (the first three), John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and James Paterson, introduce five out of the 20 young artists of a group whose innovatory techniques and style caused a stir at home and abroad at the end of the 19th century.

The Glasgow Boys are in town. You might not know them, unless you have Scottish connections, but they are the subject of Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys, 1880-1900, the Royal Academy’s exhibition in the Sackler Galleries until January 23.

Their names may be unfamiliar south of the border, perhaps the pictures too. But many of the 80 works on show — oil paintings, watercolours and pastels — have long been favourites for visitors to Aberdeen or Glasgow or other Scottish collections the works come from. Last summer the exhibition (twice as big as London’s) was the most popular ever at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

Who were these ‘boys’? And what set them apart? It turns out they weren’t really a group, more a loosely knit collection of individual artists, friends from school or art college or from working in France, with a shared set of interests.

They are considered, however, as among the most experimental and ambitious artists ever produced in the UK. They evolved a new style of art that veered away from the staid, heavily varnished, historical or anecdotal pictures then favoured by the Scottish Academy — away from kilts, stags at bay, the sentimental — towards the en plein air style of painting of France.

Wanting to simplify things and limit colour, they looked to artists such as Whistler (see his influence in Lavery’s twilight paintings of the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, and portraits in the last room), and Dutch and French Naturalist painters such as Bastien-Lepage, adopting the latter’s use of broad ‘square’ brushstrokes (see Pauvre Fauvette in the first room).

They embraced realism like Millet. Typically, they took inspiration from the rural workers and villages around them, not finishing a work outside like French painters but capturing its light and spirit in sketches made in front of the subject, to complete in the studio. They also favoured high horizon lines and single figure compositions — ‘snapshots in time’, Kelvingrove’s curator calls them.

There is a variety of styles and subjects here, from Crawhall’s animals to experimental watercolours, some of which look like oils, to Henry and Hornel’s The Druids that to me looks as if made for an album cover.

I’ll take just two examples. The first painting on show is a powerful if sombre depiction of a highland funeral by Guthrie, uncanny in its realism. The low-key palette and mourners’ sad heads bowed against a sadder sky stress the bleak realities of their hard lives.

Likewise by Guthrie, A Hind’s Daughter is a marvellous portrayal of a farm labourer’s daughter who stops in her work to look directly, stoically at the viewer. I loved the way lines criss-cross in the painting, the rows of vegetables, the field edge, the upright trees, and all in wonderful contrast to the globular cabbages. The high horizon makes it seem that we, too, are in that cold muddy field.

Cold and probably muddy too, but infinitely more appealing, were two fine landscapes. Monochromatic, almost Corot-esque, James Paterson’s Autumn in Glencairn was so beguiling I wanted to grab my coat and go there. The way he rendered the light on the water, painted parts in soft focus, and reduced his palette makes it remarkably photo-realistic. Small surprise to learn that Paterson was a talented photographer.

Then, in the final room, the show-stopper for me was George Henry’s A Galloway Landscape. With its rich Gauguin-esque palette and curly stream that takes the eye up and over the rounded hills in just the same way as the cattle are meandering, it is an extraordinary composition.

I’ll take that one home, if I may.