The story
Pollok House sits in a wooded park on the south side of Glasgow, an elegant Edwardian country house finished in 1908 for the Stirling Maxwell family, who had held the land since the 13th century. The reason art lovers make the trip is one man's taste. Sir William Stirling Maxwell, writing in the 1840s, was among the first British scholars to take Spanish painting seriously, at a time when it was little regarded, and he collected it accordingly.
The result is a country house hung with Spanish masters rare in Britain, with works by El Greco, Goya and Murillo shown in domestic rooms rather than gallery halls. The family gave house and collection to Glasgow in 1966.
The same park now holds the Burrell Collection nearby, so one estate on the edge of the city offers two very different collectors' lifetimes of buying within a short walk of each other.
