He was then engaged at Cumnock, painting the ornamental lids of snuffboxes, and afterwards employed in Edinburgh by William Home Lizars, the engraver, to colour the illustrations in Prideaux John Selby's British Birds and similar works.

He returned to Glasgow in 1827, and was employed on several large pictures for the decoration of a public hall in St. George's Place, and he did a little as a theatrical scene-painter.

)By the early 1830s McCulloch’s exhibits with the Glasgow Dilettanti Society and with the Royal Scottish Academy had begun to attract buyers, notably the newly instituted Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland.

His own art collection was evidence of his admiration for 17th-century Dutch painters, for J. M. W. Turner and Richard Wilson and for contemporaries such as Clarkson Stanfield.

His widow Marcella McLellan, from Sleat on the Isle of Skye, left Scotland for Australia after his death, but died on the voyage.

His constant aim was to paint the silence of the Highland wilderness where the wild deer roam with the kind of poetic truthfulness he admired in Wordsworth.

The accomplished watercolours and broadly painted oil sketches that he produced throughout his career attracted little notice at the time and have remained comparatively unknown.

These paintings celebrate the romantic scenery of the Highlands and evoke a magnificent sense of scale, emphasizing the dramatic grandeur.

In the Victorian period the Highlands to be defined as a wilderness instead of a populated space and many communities were cleared from the land in favor of large sheep farms and sporting interests.