As the Edinburgh Art Festival is, in some part, a joining up in programme form of the exhibition programmes of Edinburgh’s existing galleries alongside its own ‘fringe’ of pop up events, you can find yourself in any corner of Edinburgh, within reason, and partake of an art festival tour of your own making. You could, of course, simply go on one of the festival’s organized Art Lates and get someone to take you round (with drinks and music), but I took the pin in the map approach and started on the Mound at the National Galleries, making my way down to the Fruitmarket above Waverley station, then on up Cockburn Street via Stills to the Royal Mile – crossing before the place becomes impassable due to assorted jugglers, levitating yodas and desperate thesps – and headed for the Talbot Rice Gallery.

Amidst all the hoopla, these partner exhibitions are, this year, filled with serious contemplative stuff, and Rembrandt, who makes a good starting point not least because he is central here both geographically and artistically, is no exception. The Royal Scottish Academy building is a superb setting for this chronological run-through of Rembrandt masterpieces, here viewed from the perspective of the Dutch master’s influence on British collectors and artists from the 17th century to the present day.

If you are looking more for blockbuster paintings rather than illuminating insight, you may drift off a little, but there are masterpieces aplenty here, not least The Mill, on loan from Washington DC and the visceral Belshazzar’s Feast. Certainly the paintings themselves glow, surrounded by varying attempts both to copy, and otherwise taking direct inspiration. There are some excellent moments, interesting historical insights, and humour, too, provided by Hogarth’s satirical offerings on the state of the British art market.

A soggy walk – the first day of the long-awaited rains – brought me to the Fruitmarket, where Tacita Dean’s compelling film “Event for a Stage” is the centrepiece to an equally compelling exhibition of works. You’ll need to book in (free) to see the film itself, an interrupted monologue by an actor in disparate wigs, playing on the idea of what it is to be an actor, in life and on stage. Around the gallery, artifice and stage management skim everyday life.

Dean’s work repays attention and patience. Downstairs, 20 photogravures, “The Russian Ending” are black and white photos of events past, annotated by Dean as if part of a film, with set directions, thoughts and scathing yet revealing notes – “who gives a f*** about Worthing?...a B movie” she writes at the bottom of “The Wreck of Worthing Pier”, although you have to peer up close to discover and decipher them. In the annex, the installation “Foley Artist” (1996) is a compelling interplay between sound artists, viewed on screen, their instructions and the intermittent intonation of Shakespeare in an imagined theatre and a back alley romance, all playing with our concepts of narrative and what is real.

Round the corner at Stills, Gunnie Moberg’s photography and Margaret Tait’s films are both a glimpse into a past world, and a reminder that aesthetics considered modern now were being plied by artists some 50 years ago. Moberg’s black and white images of Orkney, aswell as her portraits of Orcardians and other cultural figures are finely judged. Aerial shots put a new view on the landscape, the rounded repetitiveness of the Brochs and Churchill barriers, the astonishing sheep fort at Rusk Holm and the vernacular buildings. There is an aerial view of Skara Brae, a wound in an unpicked landscape, then the curious pinnacles of cormorants on nests, a little settlement of equidistant structures, a parallel universe of civilized birds.

Margaret Tait’s films screen in the rear portion of the gallery, a cosy snug in which to view her informal portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid (1964), say, glimpsed across a bar or standing before the shore, reading from his work. Or “Where I Am is Here” (1964), a poetic, abstract, somewhat melancholic accretion of the Orcadian native’s Edinburgh life. It’s a unique vision that repays sitting a while.

Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery is always more academic than most, and whilst most gallery assistants are more than au fait with having to explain what contemporary art is “about”, it’s relatively rare to have to act as interpreter, as one smiling and very informative assistant does here. Lucy Skaer’s Green Man exhibition is visually spare, in the best possible sense, yet dense with ideas, not least La Chasse, with its abstracted “sentences” interpreting a mediaeval tapestry of a hunt, the action laid out on the floor in code, an unpicking of threads, as if able to recreate an object by the cataloguing of its parts.

Elsewhere, invited by Skaer, are Fiona Connor’s displaced doors, unhinged from around the gallery, removed and replaced in odd locations, exposing broom cupboards and storage rooms that are usually unseen. Upstairs, too, is Nashashibi/Skaer’s dressing down of Gauguin on Tahiti, a voice-giving to the women he painted, and an investigation into his work and tableaux. On the mezzanine outside, miniature rooms, like architectural models, offer glimpses into other worlds.

Sarah Urwin Jones

Edinburgh Art Festival: Reviews -

Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master: National Galleries of Scotland.

The Green Man, Lucy Skaer: Talbot Rice.

The Woman with a Red Hat, Tacita Dean: Fruitmarket.

The Days Never Seem the Same, Gunnie Moberg/Margaret Tait: Stills

0131 226 6558 www.edinburghartfestival.com Until 26 August

Don't miss

Cryptic's Sonica is staging two major installations in Glasgow as part of the cultural celebrations for the European Championships, a multi-sports event being jointly held in Glasgow and Berlin. Glasgow's interventions include Robbie Thomson's space-altering take-over of the pedestrian walkway of the Clyde Tunnel, now a subterranean space complete with kinetic sea creatures and "responsive underwater plants". In George Square, overground fun with Pivot, a series of giant “semi-intelligent” see-saws which interact with audiences in a constant stream of questions and chatter. Whether or not you have tickets to the games, these two art installations are very much worth tracking down.

Festival 2018, Sonica Glasgow, various locations, Glasgow, www.sonic-a.co.uk, 1-12 Aug. Booking: Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, G41 2PE, 0141 353 8000, ticketsglasgow.com

Critic's Choice

Jacob’s Ladder, Ingleby Gallery, 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh. 0131 556 4441, www.inglebygallery.com Until 20 Oct, Mon – Sat, 11am – 5pm

Our relationship with Space, in all contexts, is explored here in the pin-drop quiet of Ingleby’s contemplative new space at the former Glasite Meeting House on Barony Street. High on the wall, George Melies’ seminal 1902 film “Le Voyage dans la Lune” catches the eye, all movement amidst the still, full of imaginative leaps, a well-observed earthrise and the colonial kidnap of a moon person for display back home. Jumpy aliens are dispatched with that ancient marker of great civilizations, the umbrella.

Nearby, Alicja Kwade’s large rock installation Stellar Day (2013) is the essence of still, revolving imperceptibly in the opposite direction to the Earth, creating by default “the stillest thing on Earth” – although it’s all relative, as full of holes as Melies’ Moon.

Katie Paterson’s thought-provoking works include a melted down meteorite, recast to its exact original form (“Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky”) alongside Cornelia Parker’s suggestive “Einstein’s Abstract’s”, expressive, unidentifiable close ups of the chalk marks made during Einstein’s lecture on relativity at Oxford.

There are vintage NASA prints taken from the moon, and historic contemplations of Earth’s satellite, in the form of James Nasmyth and James Carpenter’s 1874 book. There is Marine Hugonnier’s Moon Landing era newspapers, the Glasgow Herald included, silk-screening out the iconic images. Thin as a wisp, Peter Liversidge’s “From Home” (2018) is an installation of a tape measure held upright with monofilament pulled out to the exact measurement that the moon has moved away from the Earth since the moon landing on 20th July 1969. Under Liversidge’s instructions, the tape will be pulled out incrementally each year for the duratiion of the installation: 1,000 years.

Jacob’s Ladder is presented in tandem with an exhibition in Edinburgh University’s Central Library in George Square, Astronomy Victorius, a showing of historic manuscripts on cosmography and the moon, alongside works such as Katie Paterson’s wonderful Timepieces, showing the time on all the planets of the solar system, and our moon.