Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street, Edinburgh

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, located on Queen Street in Edinburgh, was designed by Robert Rowand Anderson and constructed between 1885 and 1890. Sculpture was undertaken by W Birnie Rhind, C McBride, D W & W Grant Stevenson, John Hutchison, and Pittendrigh MacGillivray. It is an imposing, symmetrical, three-storey picture gallery and museum built in a Spanish Gothic style, notable for its extensive sculptural decoration. The main elevations are faced with red Corsehill sandstone ashlar, while secondary elevations utilize coursed bull-faced rubble. Pointed arch openings are used throughout, and the first-floor windows feature marble shafted columns. The building includes a base course, a dentilled cornice, and a pierced parapet. Octagonal corner towers feature slender buttresses and niches on each face, each containing figures, topped with crocketed octagonal pinnacles which were recently reinstated.

The Queen Street elevation has nine bays and a two-stage arched and gabled centrepiece. A shouldered door is set within a tripartite doorpiece, itself within a large single arch. Above the door are three figure panels, supporting four arcaded windows surmounted by a further sculptured panel, all contained within a large arch and pediment. Flanking buttresses with figures in niches are also present. The flanking wings have large windows on the ground floor and paired windows with simple cusped tracery on the first floor; the second floor is largely blank.

The side elevations, with four bays each, feature two tiers of rectangular bipartite windows on the ground floor, a first floor echoing the Queen Street design, and rectangular cusped bipartite windows on the second floor. The rear elevation is a simplified version of the front elevation.

The building has multi-pane timber casement and sash and case windows, a piended roof covered with grey slates, and a distinctive boiler stack characteristic of Anderson’s designs and inspired by continental precedents.

Inside, a lobby leads to a two-storey, arcaded central Hall. This hall contains a decorative painted frieze of Scottish historical figures by William Hole, completed between 1887 and 1901, and an astrological ceiling. The hall is flanked by a pair of scale and platt stairs with vaulted landings. The principal galleries are simple, two-aisled halls, with further top-lit galleries on the second floor, alongside a galleried Library belonging to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. A stained glass window in the east stair depicts medallion portraits of contemporary antiquaries by WG Boss, designed by Anderson in 1895. Armorial windows in the Hall were created by Margaret Chilton and Marjorie Kemp in 1932.

Finally, a pair of elaborate octagonal Gothic lamp standards with granite plinths flank the main entrance.