The story
Aberdeen is built of granite, and so, fittingly, is its art gallery, opened in 1885 and paid for largely by a local granite merchant, Alexander Macdonald, who left the city his money and his pictures. The columns in the entrance hall show off dozens of different Scottish and imported stones.
Macdonald had bought contemporary art of his own day, which gave the gallery an early run of Victorian and then Impressionist painting, Monet, Renoir, Bonnard. It also holds strong Scottish work, including the storm-lashed seascapes and Glasgow street children of Joan Eardley, who painted the fishing village of Catterline down the coast.
The gallery closed for a long refit and reopened in 2019 with a new upper floor set back behind the granite front, and the following year it was named Britain's Museum of the Year.
