Scottish Art and Sourdough Pizza
Scottish National Gallery
The Scottish National Gallery first opened to the public in 1859 (a whooping 161 years ago!), and was originally known as the National Gallery of Scotland.
The museum houses Scotland’s national collection of fine art, spanning Scottish and international art from the beginning of the Renaissance up to the start of the 20th century.
The origins of this collection are rooted in the Royal Institution for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Scotland, which was founded in 1819, and which opened a building to house paintings in 1828. The Scottish Academy, later the Royal Scottish Academy, was founded in 1826 by a group of artists as an offshoot of the Royal Institution, and began renting exhibition space from it in 1835.
William Henry Playfair was commissioned in the 1840s to design a building to house the RSA, which was originally divided along the middle, with the eastern half housing the exhibition galleries of the RSA and the western half housing the National Gallery of Scotland, which held the works collected by the Royal Institution.
In 1912, the RSA collection moved next door to what is today known as the Royal Scottish Academy building. A basement entrance was built in 2004 which joins both the RSA and the Scottish National Gallery, known as the Weston Link.
After a complete re-branding conducted in 2012 by the National Galleries of Scotland, the umbrella organization which the gallery belongs to, the National Gallery of Scotland was renamed the Scottish National Gallery.
Franco Manca
A small-scale chain originating from Brixton, England, Franco Manca’s Neapolitan menu focuses on slow-rising sourdough pizzas with fresh ingredients — and they’re ridiculously delicious.
