 He painted MacColla in "Portrait of a Young Scotsman" in 1932, and the picture received very favourable reviews after exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and at the Royal Academy in London.Alongside his portraiture, Baird experimented with a kind of Surrealist painting in "Birth of Venus", painted in 1934 and given as a wedding present to his close friend and colleague, James McIntosh Patrick.By the mid-1930s, all the early energy of the National Party of Scotland in Montrose had dissipated and, disillusioned, Baird turned more towards a socialist-inspired vision of ordinary working people and the effects that the long industrial depression of the 1930s had on his locality.