Kelvingrove was born of Glasgow’s exhibition age. Funded largely by the profits of the great International Exhibition of 1888 — and doors-opened as the centrepiece of the next one, in 1901 — it was designed by the London architects John Simpson and E. J. Milner Allen in a red Locharbriggs sandstone Baroque so exuberant it is usually called ‘Hispanic’: towers, turrets and a bristling skyline above Kelvingrove Park, with a programme of sculpture celebrating art and industry.
Every Glaswegian knows the legend that the building was put up back to front and the architect leapt from a tower in despair. It is cheerfully false — the grand entrance was always meant to face the park and the River Kelvin — but the story’s indestructibility is part of the building’s place in the city’s affections.
The collection inside is among the finest civic collections in Europe, and gloriously miscellaneous by design: Rembrandt’s Man in Armour and the French Impressionists; the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists; arms and armour; Ancient Egypt; Sir Roger the Asian elephant; a Spitfire hanging over the natural history court; and Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style given a gallery of their own. Its most famous single possession is Salvador Dalí’s Christ of St John of the Cross, bought by the city in 1952 for £8,200 amid loud controversy — and now beyond price.
A three-year, £28 million restoration completed in 2006 opened up the building and famously suspended the Floating Heads installation above one court; the daily recital on the massive concert-hall organ — a survivor of the 1901 exhibition tradition — remains one of the city’s best free pleasures.
Kelvingrove is consistently the most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside London, and, more tellingly, the one large museum anywhere that feels wholly owned by its city’s people. Glaswegians do not so much visit it as drop in on it.