To the Victorian mind, it was a decidedly off-message image. A woman, probably a prostitute, sits in a bar with only a drink for company. Her glass is filled with absinthe, as potent a spirit as money can buy. With the picture's heady mix of sex and alcohol, it is little wonder that Arthur Kay, the upright Scottish collector who had bought the painting in 1892, so rapidly sold it on.

But times change. Later this week, when L'Absinthe is unveiled in Scotland for the first time in more than 100 years, Edgar Degas's masterpiece will be one of the star attractions of the festival exhibition taking place at the National Galleries of Scotland.

Impressionism and Scotland will present more than 100 paintings by French, Dutch and Scottish artists whose careers intertwined around the end of the 19th century.

A large and valuable chunk of their output was bought during the passion for collecting that swept through the wealthy industrialists of Glasgow. More than that, say art experts, the relationships between buyers, dealers and artists would create a unique moment in history.

Sadly, for Scotland at least, many of these extraordinary private collections were broken up long ago and the great masterpieces sold on, often to American collectors.

The Edinburgh show not only brings back many of the most famous works, “it will also tell us a great deal about a very important episode in the development of our own national school of painting,” said Michael Clarke, the gallery's director.

Among the most famous paintings to come to Edinburgh are At the Café La Mie, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge and many of Degas's great works including L'Absinthe and Jockeys Before the Race. There are three paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, others by Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin, and eight works by Claude Monet.

That art of such brilliance should have come into Scottish hands a century ago was largely due to the work of a single dealer, Alexander Reid, a friend of Van Gogh, who had trained in Paris, before he established his own business in Glasgow and London.

“Glasgow was a great place to set up a dealership, a wealthy city, second only to London in the British Empire. Previous collectors had been aristocratic, men with the wherewithal to go on a grand tour of Europe. The new collectors weren't a bit like that. They were industrialists, working men who relied on their dealers as advisers and intermediaries,” said Frances Fowle, curator of the exhibition.

Impressionism, derided by the English artistic establishment, rapidly caught hold in Scotland. Many young Scottish painters travelled to France to study, and a new wave of artists emerged. The “Glasgow Boys” - painters such as John Lavery, James Guthrie and E.A. Walton - were not popular only with collectors in their own city, but sold well in Berlin, Munich and Vienna, and found wealthy admirers in America.

Their art was heavily influenced by the Impressionists, but the same inhibitions about moral impropriety which had seen Kay sell on his Degas masterpiece prevented most of these painters from tackling subjects like L'Absinthe.

So instead of Parisian cafes and boulevards, much of the Scots' work depicted the world that lay just beyond Glasgow city limits, a rural landscape which was fast disappearing. But if there is an idealised almost nostalgic air to some of the work, the group remained “new and original” in its output, said Dr Fowle.

After 1900, a new generation of artists emerged, including S.J. Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell, known as the “Scottish Colourists”.

The Edinburgh exhibition closes around 1930, when the Depression put paid to Glasgow's artistic flowering. The great collections were broken up, though some were sold off by their philanthropic owners and the money channelled back into good works. By the mid-1950s, it is said that there not a single professional painter remained working full time in Scotland.

Impressionism and Scotland, 19 July to 12 October 2008, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, A condensed version of the show is at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, from 31 October 2008 to 1 February 2009.

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