Titian, Vermeer, Velázquez and the skating minister, free, in two Playfair temples on a bank of earth dug out of the New Town.
The gallery sits on the Mound, an artificial hill made from around two million cartloads of earth excavated when the New Town was built and dumped into the drained Nor Loch to link the two halves of the city. William Playfair designed both classical temples on it — this one and the Royal Scottish Academy in front — in the 1820s and 1850s.
Entry to the permanent collection is free.
The collection
Small by the standards of London or Paris, and unusually high in quality per room. Highlights include:
Titian’s two Diana paintings — Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto — bought jointly with the National Gallery in London in 2009 and 2012 for £95 million between them, and shared between the two cities.
Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, his largest painting and one of only about 35 that survive. Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. Botticelli, Raphael, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Canaletto.
The Impressionist rooms hold Monet, Degas, Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon and Cézanne.
The Scottish collection
Reopened in 2023 after a long project, in new galleries at the level of Princes Street Gardens with daylight from the west. It runs from the eighteenth century to about 1900 and is the reason to come if you want Scottish art rather than European art in Scotland.
Raeburn’s Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch is here — the black-clad minister on one leg, arms folded, which is Scotland’s most reproduced image and is smaller than everybody expects. Its attribution to Raeburn has been questioned and defended repeatedly and the label is honest about it.
Also Ramsay, Wilkie, McTaggart, and the Glasgow Boys.
The other national galleries
The Portrait Gallery on Queen Street is a red sandstone Gothic building with a gilded frieze of Scottish history in the entrance hall, and is free. Modern One and Modern Two in Belford, twenty minutes’ walk along the Water of Leith, hold the modern and contemporary collections, with Charles Jencks’ landform earthwork outside. A free bus links them.
Practicalities
Free, open daily, and about two hours is right. Temporary exhibitions are ticketed. Late opening on Thursdays.
More Museums
National Museum of Scotland
Dolly the sheep, the Lewis chessmen and a Victorian glass hall, all free, with a roof terrace almost nobody finds.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
A red sandstone cathedral to Scottish faces, with a processional frieze of national history round the entrance hall.
Surgeons' Hall Museums
One of the largest pathology collections in the world, including a pocketbook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke.