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This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Edinburgh
Opened in 1859, the National Galleries of Scotland: National is fabulously situated in William Playfair’s neoclassical “temple of the arts” close to Waverley Station. It was redeveloped last year to include bigger, brighter spaces and a new, expansive lower floor dedicated to Scottish art from 1800 to 1945, which has transformed its identity. The proud assembly of homegrown works is distinctive, while the small, choice European collection includes almost every great name before 1900: Leonardo and Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt, Velázquez and Vermeer, Monet and Cezanne. The result is a miniature anthology of western painting from the Renaissance to the Impressionists. I have started with five Scottish paintings and moved on to five European ones.
1. ‘The Indian Rug’ (or ‘Red Slippers’), c1942, by Anne Redpath
This sumptuous interior with its contrast between exotic rug and domestic slippers opens the Scottish art display downstairs. Redpath was the daughter of a tweed designer, which shaped her eye for colour, texture and exciting, varied surfaces. Her picture is an ideal introduction to the Scottish collection: the echo of Matisse’s decorative arabesques and the tipped-up perspective set terms for how European (not English) influence characterises the best works here. But delightfully there is, painted on the other side of the plywood, a typically Scottish scene, the softly modulated “Borders Landscape”. New Scottish Galleries/Level 2: Room 1
2. ‘Portrait of a Lady in Black’, c1921, by Francis Cadell
A quintessential Edinburgh portrait — you still spy that mix of middle-aged smart gentility, reserve and jaunty wit in the city’s tea rooms today. Cadell makes it striking and modern by Art Deco flat glamour, bold cropping, simplified geometric design, nevertheless allowing sensuous details like the rose still life, playfully placed to adorn the hat. The setting is Cadell’s studio Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, which had lilac walls and a black floor; the subject, 57-year-old Bethia Hamilton Don Wauchope, was a favourite, long-term model. Sickert admiringly compared Cadell’s “assertion of hardness” to Ingres’s. New Scottish Galleries/Level 2: Room 2
3. ‘Still Life’, c1913, by Samuel Peploe
The Scottish Colourists — Peploe, John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Cadell (see below) and George Leslie Hunter — leapfrogged London and looked to Cubist and Fauvist Paris for influence, leaving their avant-garde Bloomsbury contemporaries far behind. Peploe wanted to create “the perfect still life”; this sharply patterned painting, with angular forms and broad structured brushstrokes loaded with acid yellow and emerald, is among the most ambitious modernist works made anywhere in Britain before the first world war. New Scottish Galleries/Level 2: Room 2
4. ‘Margaret Lindsay of Everick, The Artist’s Wife’, 1758-60, by Allan Ramsay
Ramsay and Henry Raeburn (see below) are Scottish art’s godfathers, both chronicling in powerful, empathetic portraits the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ramsay was a romantic too: in 1752 he eloped with a baronet’s daughter — the start of a long, happy marriage, although her father never forgave the couple. Here Margaret, in lustrous silk and lace, turns as she arranges flowers in a porcelain vase to gaze tenderly at her husband (and at us) — a moment where Ramsay brought fresh informality to portraiture. Mound Level/Level 3: Room 20
5. ‘The Skating Minister’ (‘The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch’), c1795, by Henry Raeburn
This balletic silhouette of a figure gliding across a frozen lake, leaving a circle of curving grooves and a froth of ice cast up by his blades, is a National Gallery icon, so renowned that it hangs in the main gallery, as if fame has lifted it upstairs, beyond the local colour it gloriously celebrates. Confidant, thrusting ahead, keeping his balance, unintimidated by nature or weather, his expression concentrated, faintly amused, the minister embodies secular Enlightenment virtues in endearingly comic form. Mound Level/Level 3: Room 20
6. ‘The Bridgewater Madonna’, c1507-8, by Raphael
Since 1945, Edinburgh has enjoyed the loan of some two dozen pictures from the outstanding Bridgewater/Sutherland Collection, derived from the great Orleans collection that found refuge in Britain after the French Revolution. A highlight is this perfect example of Raphael’s naturalism and spontaneity within harmony and grace: with their parallel gestures and exchange of gentle gazes, the Madonna and Child, her hand supporting his body, his hand clinging to her veil, are entwined into an elegant serpentine form, their figures emerging vivid and intimate from the shadowy background. Mound Level/Level 3: Room 16
7. ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’ (‘Venus Anadyomene’), c1520, by Titian
She has the twisting pose of a classical statue, but Titian’s goddess born fully grown from the sea is a splendidly real, voluptuous woman with milky skin and blushing cheeks, painted from life, wringing out her wet auburn hair as she wades through the shallows. Mythological subjects popular in Renaissance Venice inspired Titian’s most sensual, luminous painting — here and, greatest of all, in “Diana and Actaeon” and “Diana and Callisto”, co-owned with London’s National Gallery and alternately exhibited in each venue for five years. When this pair is in residence, Edinburgh is a world-class Titian destination with five paintings, all originally Bridgewater pictures. Mound Level/Level 3: Room 15
8. ‘An Old Woman Cooking Eggs’, 1618, by Diego Velázquez
Edinburgh is worth a trip too just for this kitchen interior, painted when Velázquez was 19 and demonstrating a realism so astounding that it makes the everyday transcendent. The play of light and shade envelops figures and objects in a warm quiet atmosphere, infused however with tension by the disconnected gazes and suspended gestures of the old woman and the boy. Gleaming textures — onion skin, bruised melon, congealing eggs, glazed terracotta — enliven every aspect, while suggesting the mutability of earthly things. Mound Level/Level 3: Room 13
9. ‘Fêtes Venétiennes’, 1718-19, by Antoine Watteau
Among many larger pictures, the silvery glow of Watteau’s tiny dusk scene of lovers overlooked by a sensual nude sculpture pulls the eye. Stone is translucent as water, taffeta sparkles in a last burst of sunlight, heads incline beneath curling foliage and the dance plays on. The lovelorn musician setting the rhythm has Watteau’s own delicate features. Mound Level/Level 4: Room 23
10. JMW Turner: The Vaughan Bequest, 1795-c1846
The Victorian art collector Henry Vaughan left Scotland 38 ravishing Turner watercolours to be displayed free in January only, when light is dimmest. Being so rarely shown, they are exceptionally well preserved and vibrant. Everyone has their favourites: mine are light bouncing off marble and water in “The Grand Canal by the Salute” and pale palazzi shimmering against the gondolas’ black silhouettes in “Palazzo Balbi”. We see these for just one month a year, but anticipation is also a pleasure, and how gloriously they brighten winter. Can also be seen by appointment year round in the Prints and Drawings Study Room
What are your favourite artworks in the National Galleries of Scotland? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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