Lottery facelift for Portrait Gallery

Published on Sunday 29 March 2009 23:30

THE long-delayed overhaul of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh got the final go-ahead yesterday as the Heritage Lottery Fund confirmed a £4.5 million grant for the project.

The lottery cash comes on top of an earlier 5.1 million grant from Scottish Government towards the 17.6 million redevelopment. The gallery closes on 5 April for building work to begin on the redevelopment, dubbed Portrait of a Nation.

"Lottery funding has been secured in a very, very difficult competitive environment," said Sir Brian Ivory, the departing chairman of the National Galleries of Scotland. "We had to fight very hard. It is a cracking project. It is going to transform the portrait gallery."

Plans to overhaul the 1889 building have been on the drawing board since the late 1980s, Sir Brian said. In 2005, a first application was embarrassingly withdrawn after failing to pass muster with Heritage Lottery Fund officials.

"We have been desperate to transform the Portrait Gallery, but there's a limit to how many things we can do at once," Sir Brian said.

But the lottery grant still leaves 7.5 million to be raised from the private sector and public fund-raising campaigns in the midst of a developing recession.

The project, which will see the gallery close until 2011, promises to increase the proportion of the building used to exhibit paintings from 60 per cent to close to 100 per cent. Paintings will also be grouped in galleries by theme, such as the Empire or the Enlightenment, rather than simply shown chronologically. The goal is to increase visitor numbers by 50 per cent to 300,000.

Remodelling done in the 1970s, such as false ceilings and walls, will be stripped out. Sir Brian said the aim was to restore the building to the "full glory" of 1889, when John Ritchie Findlay, then owner of The Scotsman, championed and largely funded the new gallery.

The Portrait Gallery has a collection of about 30,000 portraits and photographs and the refurbished building will include a permanent gallery for the Scottish National Photography Collection, plus a Contemporary Scotland Gallery.

The closure will mean that three major Edinburgh galleries – the Royal Museum, and the City Art Centre being the others – are shut for building works this summer.

Some major artworks from the portrait gallery are touring in Scotland in a Homecoming 2009 exhibition. Others will go into storage or hang in the other national galleries in the capital. Some highlights will feature in an exhibition later this year at the Fleming Collection gallery in London.

Colin McLean, the head of the Heritage Lottery Fund in Scotland, said: "New life will be breathed into this beautiful, historic building."