A red sandstone cathedral to Scottish faces, with a processional frieze of national history round the entrance hall.
Built between 1885 and 1890 and paid for almost entirely by John Ritchie Findlay, the owner of The Scotsman, who funded it anonymously. It was the first purpose-built portrait gallery in the world, opening five years before the one in London got its own building.
The architect Robert Rowand Anderson gave it a red Dumfriesshire sandstone Gothic exterior with statues of Scots in niches across the front. Entry is free.
The Great Hall
The reason to come. A two-storey arcaded hall with a star-spangled blue ceiling, and running round the walls at first-floor level a processional frieze by William Hole containing 155 figures from Scottish history in chronological order — from a Stone Age hunter through Calgacus, Columba, Wallace, Bruce, Knox, Mary, Burns and Scott to Carlyle.
Above the arcade, murals by the same artist show scenes including the landing of St Margaret and the Battle of Largs.
The collection
Portraits of Scots, and portraits by Scots, from the sixteenth century onwards. Mary Queen of Scots, Charles Edward Stuart, Burns by Nasmyth, Scott by Raeburn, Hume, Adam Smith, and a long modern section running to Billy Connolly, Alan Cumming and Nicola Sturgeon.
The photography collection is a real strength and often overlooked. The gallery holds the national photography collection, including the pioneering 1840s work of Hill and Adamson, who made some of the earliest artistic photographs anywhere, many of them of Newhaven fishwives.
Practicalities
Free and open daily. Ninety minutes is plenty. There is a good café on the ground floor, and the building is one of the better places in the New Town to shelter from weather.
It is a fifteen-minute walk from here down into Stockbridge, which makes a natural continuation.
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 Gallery
Titian, Vermeer, Velázquez and the skating minister, free, in two Playfair temples on a bank of earth dug out of the New Town.
Surgeons' Hall Museums
One of the largest pathology collections in the world, including a pocketbook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke.