Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

We only had 3 days in Edinburgh and this gallery is one of the more remarkable and less touristy place. Much of what I have below is taken from their web site, here.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is housed in a great red sandstone neo-gothic palace, designed by Sir Robert Rowand Anderson and opened to the public in 1889 as the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery.

Running along the first-floor ambulatory of the Great Hall is a painted frieze by the nineteenth-century artist William Hole. In reverse chronological order it depicts famous people from Scottish history including Robert Burns, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Mary Queen of Scots and many more.

As you can see below, quite literally, on the left are folks from the Stone Age and Bronze Age, … and then on the right, after the frieze curves around the atrium, are Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist; David Livingstone, missionary and explorer; Sir James Young Simpson, discoverer of chloroform and Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, a geologist.

If you are curious to see the rest of the frieze and the depicted famous persons, go to this website.

One can get a closer look at the frieze from the fist floor gallery.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a National Portrait Gallery for Scotland was championed by many, including the historian Thomas Carlyle. A believer in heroes, Carlyle wrote that ”Historical Portrait Galleries far transcend in worth all other kinds of National Collections of Pictures whatever”. The philanthropy of a local newspaper (The Scotsman) owner, John Ritchie Findlay paid for the construction and laid down an endowment.

The Gallery went through a major overhaul from 2009-2011, making the spaces more modern and accessible, including the addition of a gallery for photography, rooms for education and a cafe. All these look both contemporary and totally at home within the Victorian building.

Loved the atmosphere of the library which supports research into biographies and portraiture, as well as artist and sitter files from the 16th century.

There is a collection of phrenological heads of the infamous and the curious.

Phrenology was a science of character divination, faculty psychology, theory of brain and what the 19th-century phrenologists called “the only true science of mind.” Phrenology came from the theories of the idiosyncratic Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828). The basic tenets of Gall’s system were:

1.The brain is the organ of the mind.
2. The mind is composed of multiple, distinct, innate faculties.
3. Because they are distinct, each faculty must have a separate seat or “organ” in the brain.
4. The size of an organ, other things being equal, is a measure of its power.
5. The shape of the brain is determined by the development of the various organs.
6. As the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies.

Displays at the Gallery explore different aspects of the story of Scotland and her people, told through a wealth of imagery including portraits of famous historical figures, through to more recent pioneers in science, sport and the arts.

Writing this post caused me to read up a bit about this important person (1874-1965) who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.