Scottish gallery finally suits its intended home
Simon Tait
The Times, 3/12/2011
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is out of place on its corner of Queen Street and St Andrew Street. Built in 1889, this flamboyant red sandstone Victorian Gothic building is a sore thumb in the orderly neo-classical grey sandstone of the New Town, “a Ruskinian rebuke to Georgian Edinburgh” says its director, James Holloway.
The gallery, which reopens on December 1 after a £17.6m recasting, has until now never been allowed to live up to its promise. There had been a high level campaign for it, led by the historian Thomas Carlyle, but the government was only convinced when the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, promised £10,000 towards the costs and ended up bankrolling almost the entire project for more than £60,000.
Designed by Robert Rowand Anderson as the first purpose-built portrait gallery in the world, the national collection was found to be as yet too modest to fill it and much of the building was given over to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries and their museum. It has taken 120 years for them to leave and they are now incorporated in the National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street.
More recently, in 1994, the trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland of which the portrait gallery is a part had even decided to close it and to transfer the pictures to Glasgow. There was public outrage and the decision was reversed after a debate in the House of Lords. Even then, the gallery had to defer to the £30m Playfair Project to transform the National Gallery of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy on the city’s Mound.
It opened in 2004 clearing the way for the portrait gallery’s turn, and it closed in April 2009 for the work, by the Glasgow-based architects Page/Park. “For the first time Rowand Anderson’s vision has actually been made reality,” said Holloway.
The gallery had been an awkward mish-mash of boarded-off rooms, false ceilings and large spaces given over to storage. Most of the ground floor was inaccessible to the public, and was otherwise occupied by a small cafeteria and three temporary exhibition rooms. Even though the collection had expanded to more than 3,000 pictures, the principal portrait displays with its Ramsays, Wilkies and Raeburns were on the top floor, accessible only by a two-person lift for which too few cared to queue. Where there were three galleries, Holloway said, there are now ten.
The entrance used to be into a dark vestibule closed to right and left, but now is open on one side to a new restaurant and on the other to an exhibitions gallery which trumpets “Hot Scots!”, specially commissioned photographs of contemporary celebrities from Sean Connery to the Dr Who actress Karen Gillan. Beckoning from Rowand Anderson’s restored Great Hall, however, is a bust of Robert Burns, flanked by Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Above them is William Hole’s Arts & Crafts style frieze of characters tracing Scots from the Stone Age to J Y Simpson, Livingstone and Carlyle.
A large new glass lift whisks visitors to the top level with views of the passing mezzanine and second floor displays, where the Scottish portrait story begins with the Renaissance and James IV, presided over by the 1578 anonymous portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. The recasting has opened up areas of the building never before accessible to the public, and there is now 60% more display space so that important pictures that have never before been on lengthy show can now be seen, such as the portrait of Anne Hyde, wife of James II and, here in Scotland, VII, which Pepys remarks on having seen in Lely’s studio, “very like”. Here, Holloway explained, the larger portrait of Scotland’s influence throughout Europe begins to be seen.
A gallery is devoted to the Jacobite rebellions, where a colonnade has been recreated in which five large portraits of plaid-wearing Scots show the development of the importance of tartan in Scottish culture. Next is a display for the Scottish Enlightenment, in which for the first time the famous twin Raeburn portraits of David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau, once friends then bitter enemies, hang next to eachother.
The large collection of landscape paintings is also done justice to. “We started collecting in the 1930s, the landscape being an important part of the portrait of Scotland,” Holloway explained.
These spaces had been largely occupied by the Antquaries’ 19th century library, which has now been relocated to a mezzanine as a Victorian drawing room where visitors can, by appointment, examine documents, prints and books brought from nearby storage equipped for the 21st century. Or they can simply relax on the 1890s furniture, or examine the plaster face masks of the famous, such as Mendelssohn, Coleridge and Haydn, and the infamous body-snatchers Burke and Hare.
The gallery has also built a large collection of photographs in the last two decades, with the Hill & Adamson archive of the mid-19th century at its core, and the current temporary exhibition from this section is of Thomas Annan’s images of the Glasgow slum tenements of the 1860s.
On the ground floor, beyond the restaurant, a Victorian tearoom has been made in which portraits which do not particularly fit with the gallery hangs are seen. “Where else can you have tea with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, J M Barrie and R L Stevenson?” said Holloway.
“What we can now do with the space we have been starved of is show not just a narrative of a portrait of Scotland, but a series of narratives which we will change, some over years and some over months, historical and contemporary” he said. But fate has still had a discouraging word to add to the triumph. “We were to reopen on November 30th, St Andrew’s Day, so that we could give the Scottish people their family album on their saint’s day,” he said. “But the public service strike set for that day has meant we’ve had to put it back 24 hours – we couldn’t have pictures of the First Minister negotiating picket lines to get here.”
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD, opens on December 1. Admission free.
