The new Scottish galleries at National Galleries of Scotland are nothing short of a transformation. Gone are the muddy colours and narrow corridors which once made up the lower floor of the National Gallery of Scotland on the Mound (now known as The National), to be replaced by airy, light-filled spaces with long windows opening on to Princes Street Gardens.
The galleries have been closed since 2016 for what has been described as one of the most complex engineering projects carried out on a historic building in Scotland. The £38.62million redesign, led by Hoskins Architects, involved digging into the foundations of the Grade-A listed gallery, and building on a bridge running over some of the busiest railways lines in Scotland.
Exhibition space has doubled and a bright new entrance from Princes Street Gardens announces the Scottish collection, which was previously notoriously hard to find. Research discovered that fewer than 20 per cent of visitors to the National ever found their way there - and some of those only because they thought it was the way to the toilets. It feels like the collection, which is the biggest collection of Scottish art in the world, has a suitably splendid home for the first time.
The radical changes to the physical surroundings are matched by similarly sweeping changes in the curatorial approach, the previous chronological hang replaced by one which is episodic and theme-based. Visitors arriving from the gardens will find themselves face to face, in the first gallery, with William Johnstone’s bold abstract from the 1930s, ‘A Point in Time’, setting the scene for an approach which is innovative, occasionally surprising and - from this entrance at least - a story told in reverse. We arrive at lochs and stags and misty mountains only after seeing the most daring works the pre-1945 collection has to offer.
The work comprises paintings which hung in the Scottish galleries pre-2016, works corralled from the Modern and Portrait Galleries, and some key pieces on long-term loan. One key priority has been to bolster the number of works by women, with the first two rooms including paintings by Cecile Walton (from the Portrait Gallery), Agnes Miller Park and a recent acquisition, Beatrice Huntington’s Muleteer from Andalucia. Later on, with the Glasgow Boys, we’ll find Flora Macdonald Reid’s beautiful painting ‘Fieldworkers’, on loan from the Fleming Collection.
One room in, we meet the ever-popular Scottish Colourists - Cadell, Peploe, Hunter and Fergusson - but represented by works which emphasise their modernist edge, alongside paintings such as Stanley Cursiter’s Futurism-tinted ‘The Regatta ‘and William Crozier’s cubist landscape of Edinburgh. One wall shows work by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ‘The Four’, partly because market research confirmed that he is one of a handful of Scottish artists whose names the public recognise.
Transitions between themes are skilfully managed, and Crozier’s view of Edinburgh becomes the first in a series of cityscapes along the main east-facing wall, stretching back to the 18th century. They interact, playfully, with the views to North Bridge, Princes Street and the Scott Monument through the gallery’s long windows. A series of landscapes on the opposite wall include favourites such as McTaggart’s ‘The Storm’, and one or two surprises, like Peter Graham’s ‘O’er Moor and Moss’, included because it was the runaway hit when works from the collections toured to China in 2017.
Smaller spaces open on the right offering insights into particular themes such as Symbolism, which includes Phoebe Anna Traquair’s four embroideries, ‘The Progress of a Soul’, and paintings by John Duncan. The Glasgow Boys have two rooms, allowing some space to chart their development from rural social realism in Cockburnspath to society portraits and sunsoaked garden parties once their work was embraced by collectors. Three works by Guthrie, ‘The Hind’s Daughter’, ‘Midsummer’ (on loan from the RSA) and his Whistler-influenced full-length portrait of Miss Helen Sowerby are particular highlights.
William McTaggart gets a room of his own, allowing us to see his development from figurative works with echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites to loosely painted light-filled seascapes which seem at least halfway to Impressionism. A room called Art in the Making provides a convenient home for some popular works which don’t fit easily elsewhere: William Fettes Douglas’ ‘The Spell’, William Quiller Orchardson’s ‘Master Baby’, Daniel Macnee’s ‘A Lady in Grey’.
A large religious painting, Robert Scott Lauder’s ‘Christ Teacheth Humility’, doesn’t quite fit with any theme but has a historical place here as one of the first paintings ever bought for the National when its doors opened in 1859. It is one of 15 works which have benefited from major restoration during the period of closure; another is a screen painted by Scots Pre-Raphaelite William Bell Scott illustrating the 15th-century poem ‘The King’s Quair’.
The suite of galleries at the South end are dedicated to NGS’ extensive collection of 19th-century Scottish art. A theme called The Power of Story brings together works inspired by literature by artists like William Dyce and Joseph Noel Paton, leading us neatly into a section on Sir Walter Scott, which includes landscapes associated with his novels by James Ward, John Knox, Patrick Nasmyth and Raeburn’s portrait.
If the last two room feel a little Scott-heavy, it’s perhaps because the writer was a key figure in the popularising of Scotland in the public imagination. The paintings of the country as a romantic wilderness, which were hugely popular in the Victorian era, are now rightly regarded with a degree of suspicion, masking the reality of the Clearances and the burgeoning of sporting estates as playgrounds for the rich.
This means we are seeing favourites from the collection - landscapes by Horatio McCullough and Peter Graham’s gorgeous ‘Wandering Shadows’ - in this ambivalent light. Raeburn’s Col Alastair MacDonell of Glengarry resides here, a portrait of a man styling himself as a Highland laird while clearing tenants from his lands, and Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’ (included, although the artist is English, because of its clear associations with Scotland).
Landseer’s stag is the last work in the new galleries (or the first, if you come straight from the National upstairs). It’s a crescendo of a conclusion, but those who know the collection will be left with questions: where is David Wilkie, Allan Ramsay, the rest of the Raeburns, including The Skating Minister? The answer is: upstairs. A dedicated room at the back of the National celebrates Wilkie and other Scottish genre painters, while the other works are dispersed among the British and European collection.
There are hints, here, of the Galleries’ next big project, applying the thematic approach to the main body of the collection at the National, and showing some of the stars of Scottish art shoulder to shoulder with their European contemporaries.
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