Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery

Click image for more ...

The Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery is a short walk from our AirBnB in the West End of Glasgow. Entry is free and we went several times including the Thursday night KBS Banquet. I went at least once on my own for a lunch time organ recital.

The Kelvin river flows from above the Botanic Gardens, down through green space that includes the Kelvingrove, past our AirBnB and out to the Clyde. Lord Kelvin was a Mathematician and Physicist at the University Glasgow in the late 1800's. I'm not sure if the river is named after him — likewise for the Kelvin temperature. 

Kelvingrove is both a museum and an art gallery with lots to see. It's a turn of the last century red brick building with lots of curlicue, towers, columns and fussy details. You enter into an impressively large two story hall with a grand pipe organ at the end. This is where we had the banquet and where I attended the organ recital. To the left and right are two story wings with smaller, but grand, two story halls down the centre.

The one grand hall, to the west, is more like a museum with a large stuffed elephant and a hanging WWI ear spitfire airplane. There are exhibits of armour from days of old.

The other grand hall, to the east, is more like a gallery with lots of statuary and many heads hanging on thin lines. Lots of interesting artwork.

One small darkened "chapel" has a large Salvador Dali painting ("Christ of Saint John of the Cross" 1951). Not quite as impressive as that huge Dali, "Santiago El Grande" 1957, that we saw at the Beaverbrook (see Fredericton, NB, 2024).

We both are very much interested in the various schools of art that developed in Glasgow. Especially the "Glasgow Style" of Macdonald/Mackintosh.