The National Galleries of Scotland
A wander through the National Gallery, Modern One & Two, and the Portrait Gallery — four rooms of the same nation, telling four very different stories.
National Gallery | Modern One | Modern Two | Portrait Gallery
Edinburgh’s four National Galleries sit within twenty minutes of one another, yet each one belongs to a different century and a different mood. Spend a day moving between them and you go from candlelit Old Masters on The Mound, to Dada and Matisse on Belford Road, to a walk-in Charles Jencks landscape, and finish among the faces of the people who built Scotland into what it is. All four are free to enter, which — in a city that will happily charge you £35 to feed a monkey a biscuit at the zoo — still feels like the best deal in town.
The National Gallery
The Mound, between Princes Street Gardens and the Old Town
Housed in a Playfair-designed Greek Revival building that sits half-sunk into the gardens like a temple that wandered off from Athens, the National Gallery is where Scotland keeps its Old Masters. The collection is compact by international standards — this is no Louvre, and you won’t need a packed lunch to get round it — but it is astonishingly dense with things you’ll recognise from a lifetime of art history slides.
Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto hang here on long-term loan, alongside Botticelli, Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, and Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. The Scottish rooms hold Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister, a painting so beloved it appears on tea towels in every gift shop between here and Inverness, and it is, in the flesh, smaller and stranger and better than its own reputation.
Best for Renaissance and Old Masters, an hour well spent
Time needed 60–90 minutes
Nearby Princes Street Gardens, the Scott Monument
The Weston Link tunnels beneath the gardens to connect the National Gallery directly to the Royal Scottish Academy next door — worth ducking through even if only to see two very different buildings joined underground.
Modern One — Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Belford Road, Dean Village
A twenty-minute walk from the centre along the Water of Leith, or a short hop on the free gallery shuttle bus, Modern One sits in a former school building surrounded by parkland that has been quietly turned into one of the city’s best pieces of public art. Before you even reach the door, Charles Jencks’s Landform — a rippling grass amphitheatre wrapped around still pools of water — will have most visitors reaching for their phones.
Inside, the collection runs from Matisse and Picasso through to Bacon, Freud and a strong holding of Scottish Colourists. It rotates often, so no two visits are quite the same, but it consistently punches well above the weight its modest size would suggest.
Best for 20th-century and contemporary art, sculpture in the open air
Time needed 60–75 minutes
Nearby Dean Village, Water of Leith Walkway
Modern Two
Belford Road, Dean Village
Cross the road from Modern One and you’re at Modern Two, once an orphan hospital and now the permanent home of the Eduardo Paolozzi collection — the Leith-born sculptor’s studio has been reassembled here piece by piece, tools and all, like a life caught mid-sentence. Beyond Paolozzi, the gallery holds strong Surrealist and Dada material, including a significant Dalí presence, and hosts the more experimental of the two sites’ temporary exhibitions.
The two Modern galleries are best treated as a single stop with two rooms rather than two separate outings — the walk between them takes under a minute, and the café in Modern One’s grounds is a fair reason to linger between the two anyway.
Best for Paolozzi, Surrealism, temporary exhibitions
Time needed 45–60 minutes
Nearby Modern One, Dean Cemetery
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Queen Street, New Town
The Portrait Gallery is the one people underestimate before they visit and can’t stop talking about afterwards. The building itself — a red sandstone neo-Gothic cathedral of a place, designed by Robert Rowand Anderson — is worth the entry alone, its entrance hall lined floor to ceiling with a frieze of Scottish history in procession and a painted ceiling of stars overhead.
The collection is a walk through Scottish identity told in faces: Mary, Queen of Scots; Robert Burns painted by Alexander Nasmyth; Charles Rennie Mackintosh; a great deal of Bonnie Prince Charlie iconography; and a rolling programme of contemporary photography and portraiture that keeps the upper floors feeling current rather than embalmed.
Best for Scottish history and identity, architecture
Time needed 60–90 minutes
Nearby George Street, St Andrew Square
Go up to the top floor first — the light from the roof windows onto the frieze below is better in the morning, and you’ll have the upper galleries mostly to yourself before the coach parties arrive.
Want a guide to show you round instead?
Small-group art and history walking tours cover the National Galleries alongside the Old and New Towns, with a local guide filling in the stories the wall labels leave out.
How to see all four in a day
9:30am — The National Gallery Arrive at opening, before the tour groups. An hour is enough for the highlights unless you’re a completist.
11:00am — Walk to Dean Village Follow Princes Street west, then drop down to the Water of Leith Walkway at Belford Bridge. Twenty unhurried minutes, and one of the prettiest walks in the city.
11:30am — Modern One, then Modern Two Give yourself an hour and a half between the two, with a coffee at the Modern One café in the middle.
1:30pm — Lunch in Stockbridge A ten-minute walk from the Modern galleries, Stockbridge has better lunch options than anywhere immediately around the Modern sites.
3:00pm — The Portrait Gallery Finish here rather than start — the entrance hall is a genuinely good note to end an art day on, and it’s a short walk back into the New Town from the door.
Note: all four galleries are free to enter, though temporary exhibitions sometimes carry a separate ticket price — check each gallery’s current exhibition before you go, as these change through the year.
Part of the Welcome To Edinburgh museums & galleries series. See also: our guides to the best areas to stay and where to eat in the Old Town.