New Scottish Galleries at National review — fresh perspective on artistic treasures

Two paintings by Alexander Naysmith (1758-1840), Princes Street with the Commencement of the Building of The Royal Institution (1825) and Edinburgh from the Calton Hill (1820), are set on the east-facing wall of the new Scottish galleries.

Naysmith’s paintings are set on either side of a window, a series of five that face east, looking out towards Princes Street Gardens, Waverley Station and the Scott Monument. The new galleries are the latest iterations of the site that joins the Royal Scottish Academy building, named the Royal Institution in Naysmith’s day, and that of the National, one of several buildings across Edinburgh owned by the National Galleries of Scotland.

The suite of 12 rooms, built at a cost of £40 million, is a new facility that showcases about 130 items of Scottish art from 1800 to 1945, and will be free to access from Saturday.

What makes Naysmith’s paintings so appropriate for this setting is that they offer us a long temporal perspective on what we can see through the window. In a way, this is a convenient metaphor for what the reimagined curated collection and its architectural context offer in combination. Many of the works here may be familiar, some are newly restored, and others have been brought together in new combinations from the national collection of more than 60,000 Scottish works.

The east façade is now the main entryway to the whole National complex but the new building, by the designers Gardiner & Theobald and Hoskins Architects, has opened up the collection with fresh perspectives and a strong emphasis on visitor accessibility, both intellectual and physical.

The story of Scottish art is a complex one but, by focusing on this particularly strong period in our national story, the curators have assembled several retold narratives, splitting the collection into discrete conceptual and physical spaces, reflected in categories such as “Picturing Landscapes” and “Framing the City”.

These areas, beautifully lit and textured, allow natural light to ebb and flow into what were dark, cramped corridors and office spaces. A big excavation at the southern end of the site has allowed for the creation of a large new room. This space is dominated by often competing depictions of Scotland such as those offered by Sir Walter Scott and the Londoner Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), whose Monarch of the Glen offers a skewed trope of Scotland that is peddled to this day by the tourist industry.

Historically, Scottish art has veered away from confrontation with difficult subject matter, and controversial themes have been dealt with tangentially, if at all. The historical starting point for this collection was well within living memory of the Jacobite uprisings of the mid-18th century but you’d be forgiven for thinking from the evidence here that this seismic moment, with aftershocks felt to this day, never happened. The most “political” work, William McTaggart’s The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship (1895), with its oblique references to the Highland Clearances two generation before, is the closest this collection gets to an overt critique of Unionism, landlordism and feudal inequalities.

There’s a lot of pleasure in looking here at work by Anne Redpath, the Glasgow Boys and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to name a few favourites. But there are other stories to tell and alternative narratives to pursue. Let’s hope that this splendid architectural reiteration will provide part of the setting and context for these to be developed in the future.

     Until Saturday, September 30