, Edwin Landseer's famous (and famously ripped-off) canvas of a stag stalking the Scottish Highlands. You'd never call it a fair fight, in part because the former is such a hideous picture, at least according to John Leighton, the outgoing director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland , whom I overheard talking about it recently, sotto voce. Yet, to honour the terms of a 20th-century bequest that, over the years, has been used to augment the first-rate collection of Old Masters on display upstairs, the likeness of Callum, as this doughty, diminutive pet was called, must be hung conspicuously in perpetuity. And his latest kennel, as it were, is this imposing room at the National, at one end of a suite of new galleries showcasing Scottish art that will open next Saturday, following a £38.6 million redevelopment. Expanding the footprint of an asbestos-ridden addition built during the 1970s, the galleries now extend, podium-like, beneath the National's 19th-century neoclassical edifice, a stone's throw from the Royal Scottish Academy. Clad in a new sandstone façade, they may be accessed via an inviting entrance overlooking East Princes Street Gardens, completed in 2019 – though visitors who still arrive at the threshold atop the Mound can walk continuously from Sandro Botticelli's tender, tempera vision of a solicitous Virgin watching over the Christ Child asleep in a bower, upstairs in Room 16, to, say, the Glasgow Boys' decorative visions of apple-cheeked rustics amid brassicas, down below. A new terrazzo staircase, with bronze handrails, links both floors – although, somewhat confusingly, older Caledonian favourites, such as Henry Raeburn's quizzical Skating Minister (c. 1795), remain on the upper level, because the new, below-stairs galleries h){kind=link}
Where Tate Britain’s recent rehang preechily failed, this £38.6 million project in Edinburgh is a conspicuous success
Inside a double-height gallery newly excavated beneath Edinburgh’s Mound, a Dandie Dinmont terrier, depicted, with an upright tail, in a late-19th-century oil painting, is facing down The Monarch of the Glen (c. 1851), Edwin Landseer’s famous (and famously ripped-off) canvas of a stag stalking the Scottish Highlands. You’d never call it a fair fight, in part because the former is such a hideous picture, at least according to John Leighton, the outgoing director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, whom I overheard talking about it recently, sotto voce.
Yet, to honour the terms of a 20th-century bequest that, over the years, has been used to augment the first-rate collection of Old Masters on display upstairs, the likeness of Callum, as this doughty, diminutive pet was called, must be hung conspicuously in perpetuity. And his latest kennel, as it were, is this imposing room at the National, at one end of a suite of new galleries showcasing Scottish art that will open next Saturday, following a £38.6 million redevelopment.
Expanding the footprint of an asbestos-ridden addition built during the 1970s, the galleries now extend, podium-like, beneath the National’s 19th-century neoclassical edifice, a stone’s throw from the Royal Scottish Academy. Clad in a new sandstone façade, they may be accessed via an inviting entrance overlooking East Princes Street Gardens, completed in 2019 – though visitors who still arrive at the threshold atop the Mound can walk continuously from Sandro Botticelli’s tender, tempera vision of a solicitous Virgin watching over the Christ Child asleep in a bower, upstairs in Room 16, to, say, the Glasgow Boys’ decorative visions of apple-cheeked rustics amid brassicas, down below. A new terrazzo staircase, with bronze handrails, links both floors – although, somewhat confusingly, older Caledonian favourites, such as Henry Raeburn’s quizzical Skating Minister (c. 1795), remain on the upper level, because the new, below-stairs galleries house Scottish art made between 1800 and 1945.
Still, the development elegantly reconfigures what Leighton rightly calls a “complex” site, and the National’s Scottish pictures, which previously appeared so cramped, now have space and light, in a fit-for-purpose home with large windows offering vistas of the Old and New Towns, next to which views of the city, by Alexander Nasmyth, have been neatly hung.