Every year at the end of November, visitors to the Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland staff could be forgiven for crying “already!”, at the sight of the Christmas tree towering in the Great Hall. Now that December is upon us, here is a virtual version for all of you who are missing out on the occasion this year. The annual Portrait Gallery Carol Concert, performed by the Edinburgh University Singers, has relocated to the National Gallery of Scotland and will be held on Wednesday 9 December, from 1.15 to 1.45pm.
The Great Hall is one of my favourite experiences in Edinburgh, I never tire of walking through the front doors and coming upon this part of the Gallery and all the treasures within. As a central part of Portrait of the Nation, we are looking at ways to re-interprete this part of the building. Part of this process consists of delving into the history of the decorative scheme of the Great Hall – the frieze, murals, zodiacal ceiling, heraldry and stained glass.
Seventeen themes from Scottish history were originally proposed by William Hole (1846-1917) to occupy both, the walls of the Ambulatory, and those of the Great Hall on the ground floor. In the end, the ground floor walls were left as brick and Hole executed seven scenes on the Ambulatory of the Portrait Gallery, continuing his scheme in a number of paintings for the Edinburgh City Chambers. From our temporary offices at Baden-Powell House, it was only a hop, skip and jump across the Royal Mile, to the City Chambers, for a rewarding examination of Hole’s later murals illustrating Scottish history.
Four years ago Martyn Wade, the Chief Executive and Librarian of the National Library of Scotland, and I signed a formal Partnership Agreement to help the Library and the Portrait Gallery work closer together. It was aimed to cut out bureaucracy and increase co-operation at every level across both organisations. It has been far more productive than I had dared imagine. For instance, we have helped the Library promote their campaign to secure the fabulous Murray Archive for Scotland and we have organised three joint exhibitions. Another aspect of closer working is our occupation of Baden Powell House at 3 Victoria Terrace. We rent this from the National Library and we use their excellent café (just yards away) as our ‘common room’.
Last Friday we held a party in the Library to make sure that the Portrait Gallery curators and Education staff get to know their colleagues in the Library. It was a jolly evening. Obviously some I know well, others by name only. When we reopen in exactly two years time we want to be thinking of the curators and resources of the National Library as complementing our own staff and collection. Then we really will have established a true partnership.
Now that we’re barred from entry until the builders leave and I have to say I’m missing the Portrait Gallery. While Baden Powell House is in a prime location for nice wee sandwich places to try out and good distance away from the noise of the tram works, it’s all floor and ceiling tiles and strip lighting.
Miles away from gothic arches, antique charm and secret spiral staircases up to dusty attic rooms and without a gilt framed portrait in sight. It’s far too much like a ‘proper’ office up here and I can’t wait to get back into 1 Queen Street.
On a more positive note, the plans for the new gallery spaces are fully underway and in the last week I’ve had two interesting and productive meetings with curators regarding content for two of the galleries I am helping with. We also received good news regarding funding for our involvment in the Inspiring Change Project. Co-ordinated by Motherwell College and involving a whole host of other cultural institutions and academic researchers who will evaluate the impact of the project, the National Galleries of Scotland Outreach Team will support selected artists to develop portrait projects with inmates in five prisons across Scotland. The project is set to run for a year, providing an important part of our wider outreach strategy and undoubtably producing some interesting and worthwhile results.
Well, thank goodness the period of talking and planning is giving way to a time of action! These are still early days of course but perhaps I can do no better than attach some photographs to prove it.
Scaffolding going up. It’s been a nail-biting few weeks as we compete with the tram works to occupy Queen Street.
Ground floor: the daylight returns; parquet flooring in bags for re-use. Note the 1930s radiator boxes.
The middle floor, east side: unseen by the public for 15 years.
We have all waited long enough after all – commissioning a ‘Feasibility Study’ for the Portrait Gallery was one of my first tasks when I arrived at the National Galleries of Scotland 15 years ago. Members of our consultant project team, including Page \ Park architects, Will Rudd Davidson and a team of engineers, and Martin Sinclair, our project manager, have been involved for almost as long.
The Middle Floor, west side: blocking every window must have seemed a good idea at the time (since 1934).
Top Floor Gallery: dismantling of lay-lights (here in preparation for asbestos removal).
Vaults: the basement cleared out.
Earlier this year I was asked by Sandy Nairne, my counterpart at the National Portrait Gallery in London, to be a judge of the BP Portrait Award exhibition. This was really enjoyable – if hard work! There were five judges and over two days in an empty school in Hackney we looked at about 2000 portraits and from those had to select the exhibition of fifty six works and the winner and runners up.
I am sure there were good things we missed working so quickly but the exhibition we unanimously selected is one of the best I remember and has a very wide range of styles and subjects. The exhibition has already proved a huge success in London. Normally we would have mounted the exhibition at the Portrait Gallery but with contractors now in the gallery is a building site. Fortunately Simon Groom, the National Galleries’ Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, agreed to show the exhibition at the Dean Gallery on Belford Road. Nicola Kalinsky has been busy overseeing all the arrangements for the exhibition there and it is good to be working once again with our friends and partners from the National Portrait Gallery in London and BP.
Daniel LLYWELYN HALL, Harry Patch, 70 x 100cm, © Daniel Llywelyn Hall
The exhibition opens on 12 December and contains a diverse selection of portraits, including this portrait by Dan Llywelyn Hall of Harry Patch (1898-2009), who died earlier this year, and was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches during the First World War. Made from a single three-hour sitting, this portrayal of one of the nation’s great heros is a fitting choice on Armistice Day.
Down to Queen Street this morning with Robert Galbraith for a press call on two great pieces of news. First, that the Monument Trust has given us a donation of £2million. This is a fantastic boost to Portrait of the Nation and it means that we now have secured just over 80% of the total funding. We now have just under £3.2 million left to raise; a large sum but certainly achievable.
The second piece of good news is that we now have contactors on site. Robert and I met Jeff Thornton this morning who is the construction company’s Project Manager. He is someone that Robert and I will get to know well in the 72 weeks he will be on site. The photograph shows me, wielding a 7lb hammer to destroy one of the partition walls on the ground floor. Lovers of the building should be reassured that we plan to destroy only the later and unsightly additions to the Portrait Gallery. In fact a large part of the £17.6million project cost is to restore the great Arts and Crafts building to the form it was when it opened to the public 120 years ago.
Just as the Portrait Gallery building was beginning to look a little like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory before the Golden Ticket competition, when no-one and nothing came and went – least of all Willy Wonka himself, the Oompa Loompas, the Eatable Marshmallow Pillows, Everlasting Gobstoppers and other chocolates and sweets, and indeed, visitors - change is imminent.
Not quite to the extent of Golden Tickets being planned for the Portrait Gallery scones, but the Queen Street building is set to become an apparent hive of activity once again, as it has just been handed over to our contractors, BAM Construction, who will refurbish and restore, transforming the building by Spring 2011, complete with our very own ’great glass elevator’, which will replace the somewhat current temperamental lift.
Meanwhile, work on the Portrait of the Nation exhibitions gathers pace – NGS curators, educators and conservators continue to meet regularly with our design consultants, Studioarc. Having started last year, this ongoing process benefits from the lengthy lead-in time, allowing for exhibition content, ideas and design elements to evolve, before the final realisation of all the exhibitions and displays, early in 2011. In addition to the work going on in the exhibition and interpretation fields, planning is already underway for the ‘recant’ of the staff and collections in the Spring of 2011.
Tram passing the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, c. early 1950s © Lothian Buses
Elsewhere, one of our partnership exhibitions with the National Burns Collection and Homecoming Scotland 2009 - Zig-Zag: The Paths of Robert Burns - is in the last few weeks of its tour, at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow. The exhibition closes on St. Andrew’s Day (30 November) – never mind 1000 days until the 2012 Olympics, from this date it will be (provisionally) 730 days until the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is due to reopen. The race for completion between Portrait of the Nation and the Edinburgh tram project is underway!
It’s been an interesting week for the Outreach Team – from a recruitment drive for a surreal stampede through the streets of Crieff last Saturday, to speaking at a GEM (Group for Education in Museums) event at the newly opened Trongate 103 building in Glasgow on Thursday. We have also been busy pouring over our plans for Portrait of the Nation Live, our programme of exciting outreach projects that will take us up to and beyond the Portrait Gallery’s re-opening in 2011.
The Crieff Stampede is part of Wild Rovers, a Parallel Lives project in conjunction with Perth and Kinross Council which will vividly take the the town’s ‘droving’ past to a new future. Taking into account Crieff’’s historical importance as a market town for cattle traders from the Highlands, we have been showing people around the town two reproduction paintings by Victorian artist Peter Graham.
Crieff Wild Rovers in front of Peter Graham, Wandering Shadows, 1878 © NGS 2009
Wandering Shadows (currently hanging in the National Gallery of Scotland) and Moorland Rovers (currently in storage at Perth Museum) represent a dark, mystical and exotic version of the Scottish higlands. With Wild Rovers, we are updating this idea and encouraging participants to look at their town through fresh eyes to see what the future could be.
The Crieff Stampede event takes place on the 12th December at 11.30am from the Market Square down to the new community campus, so if you’re in the area come down and join in, masks and flags provided…
Trongate 103 opened in Glasgow six weeks ago and is an amalgamation of several cultural organisations. The building is vast, with beautiful gallery and studio spaces – well worth a visit, particularly for the fantastic John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins show currently on at Streetlevel Photoworks. We were given a tour around the building by my predecessor Janice Sharp, now working as Arts Development Officer with a remit to work with the organisations within the new building and beyond. The GEM event also featured speakers from Streetlevel and Tramway, all of us discussing our varying approaches to community engagement and attempting to answer questions such as: What constitutes a community?, Who are these ‘communities’? and Why would they want to work with us in the first place?
On the way to the train station we stopped for a drink in the bar across from The Lighthouse, looking fairly sad and dark with it’s missing ‘G’, it threw the vulnerability of arts organisations in Scotland into perspective. I hope Trongate 103 manages to last the 120 years the Portrait Gallery has and can continue to provide Glasgow with the high quality resource and experience it currently does.
I’ve always thought that one of the great delights of the Portrait Gallery is the amazing zodiacal ceiling in the Great Hall. Look up as you come in and you see all the stars and constellations of the northern sky at night.
From the beginning of this month you can now buy your very own bit of the cosmos from our Gallery of Stars. Our imaginative Development Department has come up with the plan to let the Portrait Gallery’s friends and supporters adopt a star – and what could be a more perfect Christmas present? For as little as £6.95 a month you can not only have a star named after you or a loved one, but help support Portrait of the Nation at the same time.
On a return trip to Queen Street this week, to retrieve the inevitable forgotton piece of curatorial kit, I couldn’t resist taking one last look at the room that had been my office for the last seven years.
© RCAHMS (Chrystal Collection). Licensor http://www.rcahms.gov.uk
My old spot was situated on the mezzanine floor at the west end of the building – just out of view in the old RCAHMS photograph – and further along into what is now Findlay Court and which, latterly, I had shared with our Online Curator. The absence of both, endless boxes and sets of twenty-year old index cabinets of reference archive material, only served to emphasise the bars on the windows, which funnily enough, I hadn’t really noticed before.Taking a walk around the outside of the building, it seems that this west mezzanine is the only one to have such protection against the outside world. Could this have been employed to protect the former occupants of this office – the administrators for the Board of Trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland, and possibly the original Trustees, those of the Board of Manufactures – or merely to prevent intruders gaining access to the collections out of hours?
From the early stages of the building’s inception security was a significant concern - in the Gallery ‘pass book’ from the 1890s, the first curator, John Miller Gray, records that whenever a new policeman was on duty, he sometimes had ”difficulty in seeing me in [in] the evenings.” As a precaution, in the days before identity passes, Gray insisted that he himself should ”be required to sign my name on entering, so as to preclude all risk of a wrong person being admitted.”
Suffragette, Flora Drummond (1879-1949) as General Drummond on Horseback, presumably taken on the occasion of the Suffragette rally of October 9th 1909 in Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery Reference Section
This reminds me of another point of interest concerning security, found amongst Portrait Gallery archival material dating from 1913 – during the suffrage campaign the Portrait Gallery was advised: “it is possible that the situation may at once become serious, and the Commissioner would urge therefore the wisdom of exercising special vigilance over the National Treasures in your charge.” Consequently, visitors entering the building wearing muffs and carrying parcels were asked to leave these accessories at the front desk, for fear that a concealed weapon could stray too near the portraits. My, how times haven’t changed! Thankfully, Mary, Queen of Scots, did not happen to go the same way as the Rokeby Venus, in the infamous 1914 incident at the National Gallery, London.
