National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is an art museum on Queen Street, Edinburgh. The gallery holds the national collections of portraits, all of which are of, but not necessarily by, Scots. It also holds the Scottish National Photography Collection.

Since 1889 it has been housed in its red sandstone Gothic revival building, designed by Robert Rowand Anderson and built between 1885 and 1890 to accommodate the gallery and the museum collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The building was donated by John Ritchie Findlay, owner of ''The Scotsman'' newspaper. In 1985 the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland was amalgamated with the Royal Scottish Museum, and later moved to Chambers Street as part of the National Museum of Scotland. The Portrait Gallery expanded to take over the whole building, and reopened on 1 December 2011 after being closed since April 2009 for the first comprehensive refurbishment in its history, carried out by Page\Park Architects.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is part of National Galleries of Scotland, a public body that also owns the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

History

The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was founded in 1780 by David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan. Its members donated items of interest, and in 1781 it bought a place to properly store this material, the Antiquarian Society Hall, located between the Cowgate and Parliament Close, just to the west of Old Fishmarket Close, as shown on Alexander Kincaid's ''Plan of the City''. It moved several times, from 1826 it rented space in the Royal Institution at the foot of The Mound, owned by the Board of Manufactures. By 1851 its collections were in 24 George Street, in November it agreed with the Board to make the collections National Property, with the government to provide continuing accommodation for the collections and for the Society's meetings. As part of the agreement, the collections moved back to the Royal Institution in 1858.

Erskine had also formed a collection of Scottish portraits in the late 18th century, many are now in the museum. When the National Portrait Gallery, London, was established in 1856 and became very successful, the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle was among those calling for a Scottish equivalent, but the government was reluctant to commit to funding the project.Press, "Facts and Statistics" and "The History of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery"
History & Architecture
, NGS

In 1882 John Ritchie Findlay endowed a new building on Queen Street, costing £50,000, designed by Robert Rowand Anderson to accommodate both the antiquities collections and the portraits. It was completed in 1890. At the centre of the facade of the symmetrical building, a large Main Hall formed a shared entrance to the two institutions. The Portrait Gallery occupied the east wing of the building, and the Museum of Antiquities took up the west wing.

The portrait gallery museum was established in 1882, before its new building was completed. The London National Portrait Gallery was the first such separate museum in the world, however it did not move into its current purpose-built building until 1896, making the Edinburgh gallery the first in the world to be specially built as a portrait gallery.Press, "The History of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery"
History & Architecture
, NGS Special national portrait galleries remain a distinct Anglophone speciality, with the other more recent examples in Washington DC (1968), Canberra, Australia (1998), and Ottawa, Canada (2001) not so far copied in other countries. The famous collection of portraits housed in the Vasari Corridor in Florence remains only accessible to the public on a limited basis.

The building was opened in 1889 under curator John Miller Gray. Over the years new facilities such as a shop and café were added in a piecemeal fashion, and the galleries rearranged and remodelled, generally reducing the clarity of the layout of the building, and often the ceiling height, as well as blocking off many windows. The building was shared with the National Museum of Antiquities, which latterly became the Museum of Scotland and moved to a new building in 2009, at which point the long-planned refurbishment of the Portrait Gallery could begin, with funding from the Scottish Government and the Heritage Lottery Fund, amongst others. The work generally restores the gallery spaces to their original layout, with areas set aside for education, the shop & café, and a new glass lift—greatly improving access for disabled visitors. In total the Portrait Gallery has 60% more gallery space after the changes, and at the reopening displayed 849 works, of which 480 were by Scots. The cost of the refurbishment was £17.6 million. The entire building comprises 5672 Sq. metres.

The building

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery building is a large edifice at the east end of Queen Street, built in red sandstone from Corsehill in Dumfriesshire. It was designed by Robert Rowand Anderson in the Gothic Revival style with a combination of Arts and Crafts and 13th-century Gothic influences, and is a Category A listed building. Built between 1885 and 1890, the building is noted for its ornate Spanish Gothic style, an unusual addition to Edinburgh's mostly Georgian Neoclassical New Town. The windows are in carved pointed arches and the main entrance on the Queen Street front, surrounded a large gabled arch, leads to the main entrance hall, arcaded with pointed arches, which originally served both the Portrait Gallery to its east, and the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland to its west. A distinctive feature of the gallery is its four octagonal corner towers topped with crocketed Gothic pinnacles; originally, Anderson had intended to flank the facade with a pair of large Franco-Scottish tourelles, but these were replaced at the request of the benefactor by the pointed turrets seen today.

Anderson's design was influenced by a number of other Gothic and Gothic Revival architectural works, in particular the rectangular Gothic Doge's Palace in Venice and the works of George Gilbert Scott, and similarities have also been drawn between the Portrait Gallery and Anderson's Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute, which he designed for the 3rd Marquess of Bute in the late 1870s.

Around the exterior are sculpted figures of noted Scots set in niches, designed by William Birnie Rhind. These were added in the 1890s to compensate for the lack of contemporary portraits of medieval Scots in the gallery's collection at the time, as was the large processional frieze inside the main entrance hall, painted by William Hole. This mural, added in 1898, depicts an array of notable Scots from history, ranging from Saint Ninian to Robert Burns. Figures were added to the frieze over the years after the gallery opened, and Hole added further large mural narrative scenes on the 1st floor later.

Collection

The museum's collection totals some 3,000 paintings and sculptures, 25,000 prints and drawings, and 38,000 photographs. The collection essentially begins in the Renaissance, initially with works mainly by foreign artists of Scottish royalty, nobility, and mainly printed portraits of clergymen and writers; the most notable paintings were mostly made on the Continent (often during periods of exile from the turbulent Scottish political scene). As in England, the Scottish Reformation all but extinguished religious art, and until the 19th century portrait painting dominated Scottish painting, with patrons gradually extending down the social scale. In the 16th century most painted portraits are of royalty or the more important nobility; the oldest work in the collection is a portrait of James IV of Scotland from 1507.

The collection includes two portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots, although neither dates from her lifetime; one was painted some 20 years after her death in 1587, and the other is later still; there are also a number of 19th-century paintings showing scenes from her life. Mary's circle is actually better represented by portraits from the life, with her three husbands all having portraits, including Darnley by Hans Eworth and an unknown painter, and miniatures from 1566 of Bothwell and his first wife. There is a portrait of Mary's nemesis, Regent Morton, by Arnold Bronckhorst

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