Scottish National Portrait Gallery: A Palace of Faces
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head back at the red sandstone palace in front of you, all pointed arches, pinnacles and carved niches, with statues of Scottish poets, thinkers and monarchs standing high on its walls.
Key Facts
| Place | Scottish National Portrait Gallery: A Palace of Faces |
|---|---|
| Address | 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95550, -3.19360 |
| Part of Walk | Painted, Carved and Planted: Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens and the Mound |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head back at the red sandstone palace in front of you, all pointed arches, pinnacles and carved niches, with statues of Scottish poets, thinkers and monarchs standing high on its walls. On a street of sober grey Georgian terraces, it looks like a Gothic palace that has wandered in from Venice. This is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and it was built to hold faces.
It opened in 1889, designed by the architect Robert Rowand Anderson and paid for by John Ritchie Findlay, owner of The Scotsman newspaper, who believed the nation should be able to look its own history in the eye. It is often described as the first building in the world designed specifically as a portrait gallery, a museum not of art movements but of people.
If the doors are open, step into the Great Hall and tip your head back again. Running around the walls is a painted procession by William Hole, finished in the late 1890s, of famous Scots from the ancient past to the nineteenth century: warriors, saints, kings, scientists and poets, all walking in the same direction as if late for a train. Above them the ceiling glitters with golden stars and constellations.
On the gallery walls hang many of the people you will meet on this walk: Walter Scott, Robert Burns in Alexander Nasmyth's famous portrait, Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie. In 2011 a major renovation reopened spaces and windows that had been closed off for decades, and let daylight back into a building that had grown gloomy.
Notice how the warm red stone stands out from everything around it, a building that refuses to blend in. Now walk east to St Andrew Square, cross it on the diagonal path, and follow St Andrew Street down to Princes Street. Turn left to the great hotel with the clock tower at the corner of North Bridge.