Things to do in Glasgow City

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is the most visited museum in Scotland and one of the most visited in the United Kingdom outside London, a magnificent red sandstone building in the Spanish Baroque style that houses one of the finest civic art collections in Britain alongside natural history, arms and armour, and cultural history displays that make it one of the most comprehensive and rewarding museums in the country. The building and its collections are both free to visit, a tradition maintained by Glasgow City Council that reflects the civic ambition with which the institution was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. The building itself, completed in 1901 for the Glasgow International Exhibition, is one of the most impressive civic architectural achievements in Scotland. Its two towers and the elaborate terracotta facades facing the River Kelvin create a composition of considerable grandeur and confidence, and the great central hall within, rising to an ornate barrel-vaulted ceiling, provides a setting worthy of the collections it houses. The Spanish Baroque style, unusual in Glasgow, reflects the broad cultural ambitions of the architects and their clients and gives the building an exotic quality that continues to surprise and delight visitors approaching it from Kelvingrove Park. The art collection contains a remarkable range of Scottish and European painting, including Salvador Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, acquired controversially by Glasgow in 1952 and now the most discussed and most visited single work in the collection. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings, the Dutch and Flemish old masters, the French nineteenth-century paintings and the outstanding Scottish collection from the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists together constitute one of the most distinguished public art collections in the British Isles outside London. The natural history galleries, the arms and armour collection and the Egyptian mummies add breadth to a museum that rewards multiple visits across different sections.