Scottish National Portrait Gallery - in pictures

A visitor at the press reopening of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. 'In the last two years the building has been completely remodelled, floors and walls rearranged, small galleries created, large galleries beautifully brightened with LED systems and the plentiful daylight now entering through the new roof' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Percy Wyndham Lewis (Lady) Naomi Mitchison, 1897 - 1999. Author, 1938. 'From Nicholas Hilliard’s devastatingly subtle James VI and I to Wyndham Lewis’s hieratic Naomi Mitchison, scowling impatiently, the museum is full of great works of art' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Cleaned frescoes in the main hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 'the world’s first purpose-built portrait gallery – funded by The Scotsman’s proprietor when the government wouldn’t stump up the funds – opened in 1889, a huge neo-gothic edifice of red sandstone that more resembles an ecclesiastical building than a museum' Photograph: Murdo MacLeod George Jamesone Anne Erskine, Countess of Rothes, d. 1640. Wife of the 6th Earl of Rothes. (With her daughters, Lady Margaret Leslie, 1621 - 1688 and Lady Mary Leslie, b. 1620), 1626. 'The gallery's new inclusivity allows for some real revelations. The room devoted to Scotland’s first portrait painter fills the imagination' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery George Jamesone Campbell of Glenorchy Family Tree, 1635. 'George Jamesone (c. 1587-1644) studied with a decorative painter in Aberdeen' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery George Jamesone Portrait painter (Self-portrait), about 1633. 'Jamesone’s portraits are hardly Van Dyck, not surprising given the isolation of these early painters. But his self-portrait - leaning forward, alert and highly attentive as if dwelling on your every syllable – is a little wonder' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Unknown artist Mary, Queen of Scots, painted about 1610-15. 'The gallery has opened up, brought its portraits – its people - out of the shadows. It now shows, for instance, not just the textbook Mary Queen of Scots but images of her confidantes, husbands, advisers and detractors, notably her nemesis John Knox, to present a more intimate sense of her life' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Attributed to Adrian Vanson George, 5th Lord Seton (about 1531 - 1585), aged 27, 1570s Photograph: Antonia Reeve/Scottish National Gallery Allan Ramsay Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), 1766. 'Rousseau, painted by Ramsay for Hume when the Scot brought the Frenchman to Britain to escape persecution in 1765' Photograph: Scottish National Gallery Nicholas Hilliard James VI and I, 1566 - 1625. King of Scotland 1567 - 1625. King of England and Ireland 1603 - 1625, about 1609 Photograph: On Loan from the Collection of The Buchanan Society/Scottish National Portrait Gallery Unknown; after Adrian Vanson John Knox, 1505 - 1572. Reformer and historian, 1580 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Corneille de Lyon Mary of Guise, 1515 - 1560. Queen of James V, about 1537 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Ozias Humphry Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1720 - 1788. Eldest son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, 1776 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Sir David Wilkie Artist (Self-portrait), about 1804 - 1805. 'Sometimes the wall-texts make too much of the biography, downplaying the picture for the person. Nothing is made of, for example, the amazingly free brushwork in David Wilkie’s self-portrait' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Unknown William Hare (Life Mask). 'The library has been brought wholesale from the top floor to the centre of the building, filled with wonderful sculptures and strange curiosities, including the death masks of Voltaire and grave robbers Burke and Hare' Photograph: On loan from the Henderson Trust/Scottish National Portrait Gallery Julia Margaret Cameron Thomas Carlyle, 1867 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Oscar Marzaroli The Castlemilk Lads, 1963. 'The overlooked, the forgotten, the marginal and the nameless: these people of Scotland’s past (and present) now take their place for the first time in the newly remade Scottish National Portrait Gallery' Photograph: © Anne Marzaroli/Scottish National Portrait Gallery Thomas Annan Close, No. 46 Saltmarket From Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868 - 1871. 'The new photography gallery introduces the nineteenth century as never before: schoolboys, crofters, salmon poachers, ladies in long skirts scaling Salisbury Crags. Thomas Annan’s Saltmarket series is the first slum record' Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Thomas Annan Close, No. 29 Gallowgate From Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868 - 1871 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery Thomas Annan Close No. 101 High Street, Glasgow From Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, 1868 - 1871 Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery