They have done up the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which Carl and I visited on Sunday afternoon, a good outing for a dreich December day. I'd say the refurbishment has been a great success. The building is neo-Gothic red sandstone. It has enjoyable Victorian touches like the stairwell with murals of historical scenes e.g. St Margaret landing at Queensferry. These they have kept but they have moved the cafe, which was small, into one of the former galleries and the big arches let in a lot of light on the cafe goers. Good scones as well.
Foyer and frieze
Before the renovations the ground floor contained miles of Stuarts. God, how I got sick of seeing acres of satin dresses on the female Stuarts like Queen Anne. I can just about take them up to James VI (James I of England) and Charles I and II but when after that every Stuart is still regarded as Scots, descending through to the white-wigged Hanoverians, even though between Charles II and George IV none of the British monarchs visited Scotland. The Stuarts have now been shoved into a gallery at the top floor, and instead you have a bright space of Hot Scots with photographs of actors and comedians like Amando Ianucci and David Tennant. Though I suppose that is dumbing down, I'd far rather look at a picture of Robert Carlyle than another Stuart any day.
(Re dumbing down, there are touch screens, interactivity and the rest of it, but not too many nor overly gimmicky and these do make it pleasanter to bring children, for whom there are various activities.)
Among the Hot Scots was Jack Vettriano, the highly popular painter whose paintings look as if he has copied them from 1930s pulp fiction covers. Vettriano is always complaining how the art establishment won't take him seriously and put him in the classy exhibitions. He's finally got a spot with a self-portrait called Weight which I thought rather good - at least it caught the tackiness of the furniture of the flimsy high varnish veneered type. (I've been looking for furniture recently and have seen slabs of toffee-shiny chests of drawers and bedside tables in second-hand and charity shops.)
Weight by Jake Vettriano
Another striking picture was that of John Byrne by David Eustace. Carl, who is an artist, said something about the texture of the picture, which was ink-jet printed. My own ink jet printer could not produce that kind of detail but he assured me such printers do exist.
Ed Byrne by David Eustace
We then got a thrill riding in the big glass lift to the next floor where there were various exhibitions eg paintings of naval battles of the First World War. A section was given to famous modern Scots with a small space for poets. including the group portrait called Pub Poets, a gathering of poets of the twentieth century Scots Renaissance, MacDiarmid, Macaig and the rest. But no picture of Edwin Muir. I'd like to say he's the most considerable Scots poet of the twentieth century, however to do that I'd have to read MacDiarmid, Macaig and the rest of them for comparison, which I don't want to do at present. He was a very good poet and his portrait should be somewhere. His wife Willa Muir, was represented. She translated Kafka and was an important literary figure in her day, but does anyone read her works now?
Among the modern distinguished scientists was this nightmarish portrait of oncologists by Ken Currie.
Another gallery is a scholar's library of glass fronted bookcases on two levels and in some of the cases are phrenology samples and life and death masks. Voltaire's life mask is there, and it looks as witty and clever as a mask can. On the other end of the scale are murderers like Burke and Hare, mad people, imbeciles and idiots and also a mask labelled "a cunning woman", whose expression was perfectly ordinary and pleasant. It whiffed of pseudo-science ultimately leading to race theory and eugenics.
The photography section had an exhibition called Romantic Camera: Scottish Photography & the Modern World - some good individual photographs but I could not really get the hang of the theme. This part was crowded. I think the average gallery goer prefers photographs to paintings.
The next floor up contained the more familiar collection - Allan Ramsay portraits, Hume, Scott, Burns as well as the Stuarts - rearranged. I'll come back and see them properly one day but after a quick skim we were both ready for a drink. We were full of enthusiasm for the gallery's makeover, and people I overheard were exclaiming what a good job had been done. I suppose we had seen a half dozen objects that will stick - the John Byrne portrait, the Currie oncologists and the creepy masks, for instance - but it was the whole experience in itself that we found a pleasure to the point of exhilaration. The National Portrait Gallery will be the favourite winter outing for the Edinburgh bourgeoisie as the Botanic Gardens is for spring, summer and autumn. They really do themselves very well.
