McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the succeeding decade saw regular exhibitions of his work. He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define The Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s, and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year painting in Florence and Sicily) in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made Duncan of Jordanstone a bastion of painting. His friend George Mackie writing for the 1969 catalogue saw him working in a continental tradition (as well as a "west coast Scot living on the east coast whose blood is part Welsh and wholly Celt") and exemplary of the artist as antidote to the dour Scot.

"The morose characteristics by which we recognise ourselves.., have no place in our painting which is traditionally gay and life-enhancing."

Towards the end of his exhibiting life Teddy Gage reviewing his show of 1994 celebrates his best qualities in the tradition of Gillies, Redpath and Maxwell but in particular admires the qualities of his recent Sutherland paintings: "the bays and inlets where translucent seas flood over white shores." We can see McClure today, fifteen years or so after his passing, as a distinctive figure that made a vital contribution in the mainstream of Scottish painting, as an individual with great gifts, intellect and curiosity about nature, people and ideas. - Guy Peploe, The Scottish Gallery