Scottish National Portrait Gallery

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is an art museum on Queen Street, Edinburgh. The gallery holds the national collections of portraits, all of which are of, but not necessarily by, Scots. It also holds the Scottish National Photography Collection.

Since 1889 it has been housed in its red sandstone Gothic revival building, designed by Robert Rowand Anderson and built between 1885 and 1890, donated by John Ritchie Findlay, owner of The Scotsman newspaper. The gallery reopened on 1 December 2011 after being closed since April 2009 for the first comprehensive refurbishment in its history, which was carried out by Page\Park Architects.

The founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1780), David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, formed a collection of Scottish portraits in the late 18th century, much of which is now in the museum. In the 19th century, the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle was among those calling for a Scottish equivalent of the very successful National Portrait Gallery, London, established in 1856, but the government in London refused to fund the venture. Eventually John Ritchie Findlay stepped in and paid for the entire building, costing £50,000.

The museum was established in 1882, before its new building was completed. The London National Portrait Gallery was the first such separate museum in the world, however it did not move into its current purpose-built building until 1896, making the Edinburgh gallery the first in the world to be specially built as a portrait gallery. Special national portrait galleries remain a distinct Anglophone speciality, with the other more recent examples in Washington DC (1968), Canberra, Australia (1998), and Ottawa, Canada (2001) not so far copied in other countries. The famous collection of portraits housed in the Vasari Corridor in Florence remains only accessible to the public on a limited basis.

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