The story
Scotland's oldest public museum began with a doctor's will. William Hunter was an 18th-century anatomist and obstetrician who made a fortune in London and spent it on everything: coins, fossils, anatomical specimens, books and paintings. When he died in 1783 he left the lot to the University of Glasgow, with money to build a museum open to the public, an unusual idea at a time when such collections stayed private. It opened in 1807.
Two centuries on, the art side is best known for two very different figures. The gallery holds the world's largest display of James McNeill Whistler, the American painter of misty river Nocturnes, much of it left by his family. And attached to the building is the Mackintosh House, the reconstructed interior of the Glasgow home of the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald, the actual rooms rebuilt around their pale, elongated furniture and their silvery light.
