Scottish National Portrait Gallery proving to be ahead of the rest

Its reopening may be a day late, but 122 years after its birth, the SNPG has claimed its rightful space in a way that puts other museums to shame

IT WAS planned that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery would reopen on St Andrew’s Day. Events intervened. Whoever chose the date for a national strike, they were clearly not aware of the significance of 30 November in Scotland and so the opening has been delayed by a day.

It is a pity. SNPG Director James Holloway, whose vision and enthusiasm have driven this project from the start, had chosen the date long ago and his choice, our national day, underlined the point that he has made all along that this is the most national of our three national galleries because, uniquely, it focuses on Scotland, Scottish history and the Scottish people. It is, he says, our family album and if you could see the point before, now you cannot miss it. Indeed, perhaps we need a new name for the SNPG’s new incarnation. Calling it the Portrait Gallery suggests a single monotonous art form recording an historical elite. Portraits are still the majority of what is on show, but by no means all those they represent are famous, while a good deal of the art on show is not portraiture at all.

The idea of a portrait gallery goes back to Thomas Carlyle. Properly, therefore, Carlyle takes his place at the front of the procession in the frieze of Scottish history, now beautifully restored, that adorns the Gothic entrance hall. Carlyle’s intervention was prompted by his belief in the role of the individual, of the hero – and they were almost always male – as the agent of change and progress. Now we have moved on to a wider vision. History is all of us, not just the chosen few, famous or infamous. That procession is just the head of the comet. We are the tail.

The great portraits are still there and they look better than ever. By reclaiming the space once occupied by the Museum of Antiquities in Robert Rowand Anderson’s magnificent building, the building itself has not simply been restored, it has now opened properly for the first time in the form that he planned it. In the old days, much of the collection was packed into cramped galleries on the top floor, which hardly anybody reached.

Now the top floor is the centrepiece. In place of the handful of crowded galleries are five large top-lit rooms and another five smaller, more intimate spaces that vary the pace. The grand portraits are here, organised in the larger galleries on period themes too, but they are supplemented both by pictures unseen for years, brought out of storage, and by significant loans from diverse sources, not only of portraits, but also of other kinds of painting. Thus the scope has been broadened beyond portraiture to include Scottish art more widely.

With the first gallery on the top floor, you start, as modern Scotland started, with the Reformation and the Revolution that followed. Here among the faces of the 16th and 17th centuries are Margaret Tudor, whose marriage to James IV later brought about the Union of the Crowns, and Mary Queen of Scots and her nemesis John Knox, but here too, to soften the grim visages of power, is a very sexy portrait of Anne Hyde, Duchess of York and wife of the future James II and VII, and a touching double portrait by Van Dyck of Charles I’s daughters, Anne and Elizabeth. It is no more than a sketch, but all the more vivid for that.

The second gallery is the Jacobites. One of the great lost causes of history, their fate matched so closely Scotland’s loss of independence in 1707 that, even as exiles, they have maintained a central place in our national narrative. This justifies a major gallery devoted to them here, but the art on show also demonstrates how good they were at promoting their own image. One of the most splendid examples is the painting of James, the Old Pretender, greeting his son, Prince Henry Benedict, after he became a Cardinal in 1747. Ironically it was a moment of magnificence which implicitly also acknowledged their cause as lost.

There is a nice counterpoint between the Jacobites and the central gallery where George III, Queen Charlotte and their Scottish prime minister, Lord Bute, preside in Ramsay’s grand portraits. Nearby Ramsay himself looks on in company with his father and both his wives, his friend David Hume and other figures of the Enlightenment, all gathered under the heading Citizens of the World, as surely they were. In another piece of counterpoint, however, five splendid tartan full-length portraits observe proceedings from behind a screen of elegant Gothic arches. Scotland’s history has never been simple or linear.

That point is made again as you move into the next big gallery with the heading The Age of Improvement. Improvement didn’t do the Highlands much good, after all. Here, however, are figures like James Hutton and Thomas Chalmers and (both pictures borrowed from the NGS) Raeburn’s Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, author of the Statistical Account of Scotland, and Sir David Wilkie’s Pitlessie Fair. Wilkie’s father appears in the picture and as parish minister, he contributed to Sinclair’s great project.

Imaginatively the final large gallery is devoted to pictures of our national sports: golf, curling, shinty and the rest. Raeburn’s portrait of the archer Dr Nathaniel Spens is a truly striking presence and another outstanding loan.

Then the focus changes in the smaller galleries. One is devoted to John Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae, no less than a portrait of Scotland itself, another to George Jamesone, the first modern Scottish artist. There is also a gallery devoted to women, including both heroines, like the formidable Suffragette Flora Drummond, and those who lived quieter lives. Photography makes its appearance in a gallery devoted to Thomas Annan’s pictures of Glasgow slums. These are especially poignant, not only because the streets they record are all gone, but also because of the anonymous people in them. There are hints of figures too, perhaps children who couldn’t keep still long enough. Their ghostly traces stand for the rest of us, the comet’s tail, those who are not heroes, but like these shadows flit through the story nonetheless.

As you descend, the first floor is given half to the library – the solid furnishings of the library of the Antiquaries, formerly on the top floor, moved downstairs and reinstalled – and with it the print room, and half to 20th-century Scotland. Here among others are portraits of Hugh MacDiairmid and other intellectuals of the Scottish Renaissance.

Most startling is Fionn MacColla painted by Edward Baird wearing something very like a Scots version of fascist uniform. Modernism is represented too by works by JD Fergusson, William Johnstone and William McCance. Something of Scotland’s history both of emigration and immigration is presented in an adjacent gallery that offers a sample of the personal stories of people who have come to Scotland and made their lives here.

If you begin with Scottish history on the top floor, on the ground floor you return to the present. The eastern half is given over to Hot Scots, a rogue’s gallery of living Scots, and to changing displays of contemporary art. Currently showing is Missing, a film commissioned from Graham Fagen reflecting on the fate of people who go missing and those they leave behind. It’s a nice ironic choice, quietly suggesting the inversion of Carlyle’s priorities from which the Portrait Gallery began.

Finally if you turn left to the shop, café and restaurant you will find you are still in good company for JM Barrie, RL Stevenson, CR Mackintosh and many other cultural greats sociably adorn the walls.

Altogether the SNPG is now so much a truly Scottish National Gallery that the other two are going to have to look to their Scottish laurels.

• The Scottish National portrait Gallery opens at 10am on 1 December