When the portraits almost went west: Uncovering the National Portrait Gallery’s battle for survival

THE Scottish National Portrait Gallery reopens next week after a £17 million overhaul that has restored its Victorian splendour, with backers hoping the refurbished 1889 building will reclaim its place as one of the great art galleries in Britain. But less than two decades ago, the gallery only just emerged intact from a fight for its very survival. In the coming days, many of those who once fought to keep the Edinburgh gallery – the “Jenners tearoom brigade”, as a Glasgow journalist once called them – will turn out to give their verdict on its top-to-bottom transformation.

For those involved, the bitter battle of Queen Street, over a plan by the National Galleries of Scotland’s top management and board to close the building and send the core of its collection to a new Gallery of Scottish Art in Glasgow, remains seared in the memory to this day. For the galleries’ current leadership, it’s an episode they would probably rather forget.

In January 1994, no less a figure than the then Defence Secretary and Edinburgh Pentlands MP Malcolm Rifkind wrote to this newspaper, publicly warning the galleries’ trustees that their plans “are unacceptable and do not deserve public support”. He was just one of a number of high-profile names that threw themselves into the battle, and a month later it was off the table.

The proposal, to remove the cream of the Scottish pictures in the National Galleries’ collection and ship them west, and to close the portrait gallery, exposed the fault lines in the art establishment between those who loved, and those, it was claimed, despised Scottish art.

It saw Edinburgh rally to the defence of a gallery, built by The Scotsman’s proprietor in 1889, which it had rather forgotten it loved, in what became at times a straightforward, old-fashioned, Glasgow-Edinburgh slanging match and power struggle.

To this day the galleries’ former director-general Sir Timothy Clifford is remembered as a champion of the scheme, not always kindly by portrait gallery staff. Recalling the events, he said yesterday: “There wasa lot of blood on the carpet, all very unpleasant, and as a result all those years ago I made myself very unpopular, but all I was doing was following the policy which had been laid down by my board of trustees.”

Sir Timothy, the galleries’ director from 1984 to 2006, said he was “utterly thrilled” by the gallery’s overhaul, after seeing it about a month ago. “As far as the portrait collections of the national gallery is concerned, they have never been better housed,” he said. The £17.6m project, the first major renovation in the gallery’s 120-year history, will increase exhibition space by 60 per cent and open up five stunning top-lit galleries.

But Sir Timothy stuck to his guns. He said the problem the galleries had, and still have, even with multi-million pound schemes, including the refurbishment of both the Royal Scottish Academy building, the underground Weston Link, and now the portrait gallery, is that their vast collection of Scottish art is no better shown than before.

Works by major Scottish artists are spread between galleries, and an art divide between Glasgow and Edinburgh’s collections is perpetuated.

“I felt pretty done down,” he said. “Life wasn’t easy, and all I wanted to do the whole time I was here as director was to see to it that the people of Scotland had the best possible art gallery they could possibly have. None of those things were being put at risk if it was done.”

The long-time former keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Dr Duncan Thomson, director of the gallery from 1982 to 1997, charts the battle over the gallery in a new History of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, published on Thursday, the day of the gallery’s public opening.

“It was a very fraught time, undercurrents were running everywhere. I sometimes wonder how I coped with the various pressures but I did – just!” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to campaign. There came a point when we were warned not to have dealings with the Press.

“I was always pretty sceptical about whether it would actually happen. I didn’t feel the project was being pursued in the correct way, and also there was the tremendous affection that people held the portrait gallery in.”

In 1988, the galleries were asked by the Scottish Office, which funded them through an annual grant, to look at the case for a Scottish gallery to reflect the “aspiration” of visitors. Under their then new chairman, Sir Angus Grossart, and new director Sir Timothy, the galleries’ trustees took the idea and ran with it. Early plans suggested the Scottish art go to a newly erected “Dean Centre” in Edinburgh. But Julian Spalding, then director of Glasgow Museums, stepped in with an offer of Glasgow’s Scottish pictures, if the gallery went west.

Glasgow won the bidding. “We are not destroying the National Portrait Gallery. We are moving the collection to Glasgow and creating a new super portrait gallery,” Clifford said at the time. Spalding, a long-time Edinburgh resident but who saw the new gallery as vital to showcasing Scottish art and design, called the atmosphere “poisonous”. “Edinburgh suddenly decided they liked it, because they didn’t want to lose it,” he said.

But opponents, such as The Scotsman’s art critic and leading authority on Scottish art, Duncan Macmillan, said Scottish art should not be placed in a ghetto, but shown alongside the best of European art. Rifkind’s was one leading voice in a powerful, lobby that included the Duke of Buccleuch and the Countess of Rosebery, major lenders whose family collections had provided the galleries with some of their choicest Renaissance masterpieces.

The Earl of Perth sponsored a three-hour debate in the House of Lords on the “dismantling” of the gallery, while the Saltire Society and its former chief Paul Scott called a meeting in the Edinburgh College of Art to which 1,000 mostly hostile people turned out. Glasgow journalist, Ruth Wishart, later a gallery trustee, called it a mass meeting of the “Jenners tearoom brigade”. The distant descendants of its founder, Scotsman owner John Ritchie Findlay, were called into the fray, while even the thoroughly Glaswegian writer, Alasdair Gray, came down on the side of the gallery.

It is essential,” Rifkind declared in his Scotsman letter, as the battle reached its climax, “that the National Gallery at The Mound retains the finest of its Scottish paintings, as well as its international collection... I know of no national gallery anywhere in the world that does not display the finest pictures of its own country alongside its international masters.” Secondly, he made it clear, “it is undesirable to close down the Scottish National Portrait Gallery”.

Clifford’s response to Edinburgh’s most senior figure in the ruling UK government – a former Secretary of State for Scotland, and one of six local MPs who all opposed the closure – was typical. Suggesting Rifkind was “under a slight misapprehension” on the fate of the Scottish pictures, and that he’d appointed all the trustees he now quarrelled with, he called the letter “astonishing”.

Councillor Jean McFadden, leader of Glasgow City Council and part of the powerhouse behind the Glasgow bid, made her own response to Rifkind’s letter, saying brusquely that arguments had already been aired, and failed to convince the trustees. “It seems silly to reopen an argument which was lost a long, long time ago.’’

It was not perhaps the most astute political analysis. A month later, in February 1994, the nine galleries’ trustees backed down on the portrait gallery’s closure. They pledged to explore how it could be “maintained within its present building’’. By May, the broader idea of a new gallery of Scottish art, based in Glasgow, was also declared dead.

The arguments over the National Galleries of Scotland’s treatment of Scottish art – and the failure, to this day, to display it convincingly or coherently alongside its core British and international collection on the Mound – continue.

“I’m hugely supportive of what the portrait gallery has done, and it’s absolutely marvellous, but I don’t rule out the possibility of one day there being a proper gallery of Scottish art,” Clifford said.

The Scotsman – which had joined the campaign to save the gallery – concluded: “At one level it is possible to feel some sympathy for the trustees, as their plans for a gallery of Scottish art in Glasgow finally turn to dust. Anyone caught in the middle of hostilities that set one end of the M8 against the other is bound to emerge concussed. In fairness to the trustees, that was a battlefield into which they stumbled rather than marched.”

Sir Malcolm, now MP for Kensington, said yesterday: “I lived in Edinburgh most of mylife and I know the gallery well. It seemed to me that a freestanding national portrait gallery was very much what Scotland had and needed and it would be a mistake to combine its collection with a general Scottish gallery or museum, because the interest in the gallery extended beyond purely Scottish issues.

“Many of the people featured in it had a much wider reputation, and it was right to attract a much wider audience. In any event, I don’t like closing galleries on principle.” He featured in it himself, he noted, in a group portrait of Scottish Secretaries of State by the artist Harry More Gordon.

“It is always marvellous when a major building of that kind is refurbished in the way it has been, and there for the next hundred years. It is now safeguarded for a future generation which is glorious.”