How do our public art galleries work in 2024? What do they aim to do? What could they do better? 

The people who run the galleries can be heroes and villains, depending on what we see from the outside. We rarely consider or reflect on the world they inhabit, the challenges they face on a daily basis, and the rewards.

There is no typical gallery and no typical member of staff, but Roger Spence went to the middle of Scotland to talk to Amy Fairley, responsible for what might be described as a mid-range art collection and gallery. Their discussion covered ground familiar to most working in this sector, at a moment of change for Perth Art Gallery, with change and choices crystallising issues.

A couple of weeks after recording the interview, two new Galleries came to life, with the opening of the William Gillies Exhibition, and Perth Art Gallery was reborn. The temporary world of the last few years has been swept away and the immediate impression is of a stunning new Gallery, packed with high quality work, excitingly hung in bold and well-considered settings, and offering a wide range of intelligent and illuminating cross-references. It’s a major statement, and a triumph for all concerned. The images used throughout this article were taken at this later point and show the Gallery as it will be until March 2025.

Perth Art Gallery sits right in the North East corner of the old town of Perth. Until recently it was the Museum and Art Gallery, but the Museum has taken flight, moving to the centre of the old town and taking over the former City Hall. That move has been carried out with some flourish and fanfare (and finance) and has left Perth Art Gallery with a much bigger space and a grand building all to itself. It’s the moment when it forges its own identity and is assessed purely on its own terms.  

Public art stands alone in Perth for the first time, just as its founding benefactor intended. (Note 1)

It has also been the moment to move the crown jewels of the Perth art scene, the Fergusson Gallery. This has been housed for the last thirty-plus years in the former Waterworks at the south east tip of the old town, but has been closed, and replaced by a single-room Fergusson Gallery in Perth Art Gallery, with generous funding of £65,000 from the JD Fergusson Art Foundation.

Amy Fairley is the Collections Officer (Art) for Culture Perth and Kinross. Like so many public art galleries, Perth Art Gallery has no Director. Management responsibility ultimately lies with the Culture Perth and Kinross quango, and with Rhona Corbett, its Head of Heritage and Culture, and Helen Smout, Chief Executive. Amy is the officer dedicated to art. She’s upbeat and enthusiastic, welcoming me into the foyer area of the Gallery on a Tuesday in October when the Gallery is closed.

What does her job entail?

“I deal with enquiries; oversee research visits both to the Collection here and to the archive (we’ve got a fantastic JD Fergusson and Margaret Morris archive, which is still stored at the Fergusson Gallery up the road).”

“I’ve got a researcher coming over from Princeton University in two weeks time. She’s coming over to look at the photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, who created these surreal photographs as well as some quite traditional ones, and he photographed Margaret Morris, so we have some of his works in the collection, and she’s coming over to research him.”

“I’m also responsible for putting forward exhibition ideas and proposals. If they’re accepted, writing the text and labels for those; often there’ll be a pamphlet. We don’t tend to go for exhibition catalogues, they’re expensive to produce and we don’t have the capacity for someone to do the necessary research, which is a shame. In the past we had more staff and we could do these kind of things, but it’s something we’re not able to do any more.

“I feed into drafts of policy meetings. There’s actually more paperwork involved than you would think, which is the same everywhere. I do tours. I do talks, and at the moment, I’m working on a couple of funding applications as well. In the past we had an acquisitions budget. Now, anything we want to acquire we have to fund-raise for it. I think we’re all chasing the same small pots of money. The Art Fund are very good and the National Fund for Acquisitions are fantastic at supporting acquisitions, but their pots are limited as well. We’re fortunate in that we’ve got a couple of benefactors who do support acquisitions; but it’s tricky…”

“When I first started there was a social history curator, a “dec-art” (decorative arts) curator, a principal art officer and a Fergusson gallery officer. When the Fergusson Gallery opened there was a full-time technician there and a secretary. The secretary and the full-time technician… that ended, the dec-art curator left and they didn’t replace her, and the Principal left and they didn’t replace her for a while, and when they did she went off to another post. So that really left me, overseeing the Fergusson, dec-arts, and fine arts and I oversee costume and textiles as well.”

From a personal perspective, what’s the most interesting and exciting aspect of what she does?

“My favourite part is working on the layout of exhibitions and seeing the paintings going on the wall and the exhibition complete. I love that.”

Currently, the Gallery has a Fergusson show, Fergus and Meg, in one room, which Amy curated, and a Modern Scots exhibition in another. The galleries in the inner hall have 17th to 19th century paintings from the collection. What role did Amy play in the Modern Scots exhibition?

“Rhona and I worked together and we spoke with Alice Strang (Note 2) as well. We wanted to get her expert opinion on some of the works that she considered important, and she came along and had a look at the collection, and ultimately we thought what we wanted to do was to represent as many female artists as we possibly could, and look at Scottish artists over the last 100 years. I did leave out the Colourists because I thought Fergusson would be opening soon and we could exhibit their works within that collection, but that didn’t happen in the end.”

“I am currently working on a proposal for a Scottish Colourist exhibition and I’ve been in touch with Natasha Richards, the curator of the Aviva art collection. As you know, Aviva have close ties with Perth, having previously been General Accident which was formed in Perth, and they have quite a number of really beautiful works by Colourists that normally are hung in their offices across the country. She, Rhona and I are very keen that the general public will get the opportunity to see these works. We’re having talks right now about bringing them to Perth and borrowing other paintings to have a Scottish Colourist show, which we’ve not had in a while, certainly not in Perth in the last ten years or more. That will be really exciting to get those works out.”

“I did go to Culzean Castle a few years ago with a colleague that’s no longer here because they also have a small, really beautiful collection of artworks by the Colourists. Those works were given to the National Trust and they currently just hang in the apartments that you can rent within Culzean Castle, but again the general public can’t access them and probably aren’t aware of them, and I think it’s exciting to bring artworks to the public that you can’t see on Art UK or in public collections.”

“We have also been in touch with Sir Geoffrey Millais, and he has a sizeable collection of Millais’ work. He’s a direct descendant. His father’s third wife sold a lot of the collection off and he’s made it his life’s work to try to buy much of it back. So he donated one of his masterpieces to the Tate, and he had initially thought of donating his collection on his death – he doesn’t have any descendants – to the Tate, and then I think he felt it would just be swallowed up. The Tate collection is so vast. I think he thought they wouldn’t be able to make such a big song and dance of it. So he looked further afield and due to Millais’ many connections with Perth, he’s hopefully going to loan us some work.  In which case, we’ll have a Millais exhibition coming up, and I’m sure that will be a big draw.”

“The works he has aren’t typical pre-Raphaelite works. There’s a lot of family portraits, landscapes, photographs; he’s got some of Effie’s jewellery, (Note 3) and I think we could do tours, you could have a walking tour, with people like Michael Warner, who is the Millais expert, and did his PHd on him, I think in the 70s. He lives out in America now. He came over last summer and we went on a tour of a lot of the sites where Millais painted: Birnam, Dunkeld, and Waulkmill, which is just when you’re heading back to Perth from Scone on the low road, there’s a landscape with a fisherman and that was painted down there.”

“You could have tours round the sites. Autumn Leaves, one of his most famous works, girls around the bonfire: that was painted at Annat Lodge, where he and Effie lived for a while; and a lot of other works were done in and around there. There’s potential for other loans from other institutions as well, pre-Raphaelite works, so it’s really exciting. Obviously, Effie was a local woman. There were links with Ruskin as well… there are so many different strands to the story.”

If Exhibition planning and hanging are Amy’s most personally rewarding jobs, what are the biggest challenges?

“Budgets. When we put on exhibitions, we are limited… and I think most galleries are in the same situation, it’s a real challenge. Transport costs are ridiculously high, and again we don’t want to be borrowing huge numbers of works because we’ve got so many ourselves and we’re trying to be more green, more mindful of the carbon footprint. So, bringing artworks great distances is an issue, especially from other countries. However, that’s one of my favourite things to do: couriering works, which again doesn’t happen very often. I was really fortunate. I got to take our Christ Displaying His Wound (by Giovanni Antonio Galli) to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago. Then the National Portrait Gallery had a Pre-Raphaelite Women exhibition and we loaned our Millais portrait of Effie Gray, so I got a trip to London.”

How does the loan system work? Do galleries pay you for your costs or do you get a fee, or both?

“We loan to other Museums who have accreditation, so generally you ask the borrower to be responsible for transport costs and they will insure the work while it’s under their care. Some loan agreements are more specific about requirements, so when we’ve borrowed from the Tate or the National Gallery (we borrowed a Matisse and an Andre Derain), we had to have security systems fitted around the painting, and security cameras installed to look specifically at those works. Some lenders are more demanding.”

There’s no cash changing hands? No fees?

“No. The only cash transaction is if couriers are involved, and the couriers will get a payment, transport and overnight expenses”.

“I have thought about putting together a touring Fergusson exhibition in which case there might be a fee to buy the exhibition in.”

“We have a big William Gillies exhibition coming in next month, and the curator at the RSA, Sandy Wood, did a lot of fund-raising and he was able to put together a package which enables each of the venues to host the show; covers the transport costs; and also comes with an engagement sum; so that each hosting venue has £1000 for outreach. That doesn’t happen very often! He’s done an amazing job with that.”

We should explore more general topics, but before we do, let’s follow up on Amy’s personal story, and find out how she arrived in her current status. She grew up in Newport-on-Tay with the McManus as a regular go-to destination.

“My parents have always been interested in museums and galleries, so they took me and my sister around a lot. From a really young age, I just loved going to the Barrack Street Museum and seeing all the animals. At school I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, I wasn’t particularly good at art, but I did love the art history side. I applied to study art history at St Andrews and I was really fortunate to be given a place. In first and second year we had to take another two subjects. I took Medieval History. Then, because I loved Medieval History so much, I ended up doing a joint honours in Medieval History and Art History. And then, in the uncertainty once you qualify that you haven’t really got a vocational subject that you can go straight into a job with, I stumbled across the MPhil course in Decorative Art and Design at Glasgow University. It was really small. There were only seven of us on the course, so there was a lot of one-to-one, and small groups, teaching. It was really amazing: a good all-round introduction to the whole field. It was very much a classroom-based course, Monday to Friday, nine to five, but we did lots of research and study visits.”

Then after the usual job fillers in retail and hospitality, she “saw that there was a freelance contract for working on the outside artist Angus McPhee’s exhibition at The Perth Art Gallery. The deputy art curator who had previously been working on it got a job down in London, and they needed someone to come in and pick up the reins and curate the exhibition. So I applied for that and then shortly before the contract was due to come to an end, an opening came up for the Fergusson Gallery, the curator there, so I applied for that and I was incredibly fortunate to get that job.”

The Angus McPhee show was in 2013. Amy has been working at Perth Art Gallery now for over ten years. Where does it sit relative to other galleries? How would she describe it?

“In the past we’ve collected more generally, but now our acquisitions policy and statement is such that, with the exception of being offered a work by a really important artist where we wouldn’t be in a position to say no, we collect things that are related to the area or have strong connections to Perth and Kinross. We want to display things that are relevant and local, but also we do have a big storage issue.”

Would you call yourself a local art gallery then?

“We’ve been given accreditation that our collection is of national and international significance – it’s an incredible collection – it’s a tricky one. Only a handful of the artists on display next door are from Perth. Hmmm.”

I don’t think she’s alone in the world of gallery management – how does one square local relevance with international significance? There’s clearly a bit of an identity crisis for Perth Art Gallery. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of works of national and international significance, and yet Amy starts by saying they’re primary concern is local connections.

“Yes, there is a bit of a contradiction. I think it comes from the fact that my predecessors were a bit more general in their collecting, but even then… I’ve just put in a funding application for the Calum Colvin work we have on loan and he’s a Dundee-based artist, but then he’s a Scottish artist who is internationally recognised for his work, so I think there are still exceptions, if something is amazing. But in general when it comes to our meetings where we discuss acquisitions we are quite strict. We do tend to say ‘What is the relationship to Perth?’ Perhaps it’s more in terms of museum objects than the gallery objects that we’re more geared up to looking at local items.”

Visitors to the new Museum will know that it’s very much centred on a “Here’s Perth” approach, with exotica arriving via the interests of Perth collectors. But the Art Gallery’s current profile – as indicated above - features Fergusson, who had no significant connection to the City; Modern Scottish painters from the last century, none of whom were born or lived in Perth; and 17th to 19th century Dutch paintings. The two exceptions, squeezed into the Sculpture Hall, are Millais’ “Effie Gray” (the couple lived outside Perth for a period) and Paul Reid’s Pentheus (Reid was born in Scone).

How about the audience? Is it local, national, international?

“We do get a lot of visitors that come from outwith the area. Generally more in the summer holidays: tourists. But I think most of the visitors are local. Sadly, I had hoped that, with the thousands of new visitors we had going to the new museum, more would make their way across here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Our numbers are slowly increasing. I don’t think that anywhere has fully recovered from lockdown, I think most museums and galleries’ attendance figures took a dip and are really struggling to reach the pre-pandemic levels again. I don’t know why that is. But a lot of our visitors are local and returning visitors.

So would you regard Perth Art Gallery as not just a local player?

“I would, yes! And I think that’s what we’re ultimately trying to achieve. We do have this incredible world class collection, and we are in such a fantastic position geographically. I think over 90% of the population of Scotland can be in Perth within two hours.”

Could Perth position itself as a gallery that attracts people from all over Scotland?

“I’m hopeful that we can. I think there are plans going forward - with the Museum having had all the focus – to put in a big funding application for this building to bring it up to standard. There are parts of it that are looking a bit tired. I think we do want to position Perth as a cultural destination.

The city or the art gallery?

“The city. There’s so much going for the city. The High Street is such a shame. The hope was that by opening a world class Museum and Gallery we will be able to bring more people in and that will revive the High Street, and local restaurants and cafes will benefit.”

“This is something that not a lot of people know: Perth is a Unesco City of Crafts. One of my colleagues is working to raise that profile. Perth has so many amazing artists and artisans. I think we need to make more of that and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

What’s going to happen to the Fergusson Gallery? Who owns it?

“It’s owned by the Council. At the moment we do have a big issue with storage space, so for the time being it is continuing to store the rest of the Fergusson works that are currently not on display, and the archive. We do have researchers coming in and I will have to meet them down at the Gallery there to access the archive. I think in the longer term there are plans to decant material and objects that are stored down there and find a storage solution, and that building will then be handed back to the Council, and I think they might try and sell it.”

The Fergusson archive would then need to find a home.

“It would need to find a home. Some archival material is now being stored at Pullar House and I think we are looking at potentially removing some objects there as well.” 

So, how does Perth Art Gallery fit in to Perth’s future? What would be its long-term ambitions?

“We want to be a destination. We want to put our name on the map and be a place that people will want to travel great distances to come and see.”

In which case, what’s going to be happening here?

“We have tried to look at who our visitors are, and direct our Exhibitions towards those visitors first and foremost and then expand on that. In our programme coming up we’re looking at trying to be more ambitious. I think we’ve played a little bit safe, and now we want to push the boundaries a little bit. We need to figure out who we are and where we’re going and not be afraid to try new things.”

“Part of the challenge that we have is that there are a lot of people (and I am amazed at a number of my friends) who have said “It’s a shame that the Fergusson Gallery is shut down… I never actually went”. I think that an issue -and a problem that a lot of art galleries have - is that people have decided it’s not for them. They think there’s nothing that would appeal to them. It’s trying to get people who have that mindset across the door and show them that it is for them.”

“I’m also trying, within the semi-permanent galleries, to speak with living artists, interview them, so that we can put their interviews out there and allow people to hear them speaking about their own art. There’s a fantastic William Gillies film on the National Library of Scotland site, where he’s just talking about his art, what inspired him and motivates him, and I think it’s just lovely. It’s so nice to hear artists themselves talking about inspiration or what motivates them, because a lot of people don’t get modern art. They find it really inaccessible, so to have artists speaking about their own work is a great way to allow people to engage. In the same vein, a lot of people out there might get a surprise if they were to come and see what we have. It’s just trying to get them across the door in the first instance.”

The threshold issue is the biggest issue, isn’t it? An extra difficulty is deciding who you want to come in, because if you decide to be local, perhaps your national audience won’t come.

“But we don’t want to put off our local and return visitors…”

I think about Kirkcaldy, where in one gallery, to look at the paintings you have to do so in a mocked-up primary school classroom. Some people will find it hard to accept that environment. They won’t go. It seems to devalue Kirkcaldy’s art offering. The priority is getting local schoolchildren to feel at home.

If Perth Art Gallery is going to get people across the threshold, what are the assets that are going to get them to come in?

“I think it’s a massive plus that we’re slap-bang in the town centre. And it’s free. Sadly, I think we are going to start charging for some exhibitions. I know that the next Exhibition that is going on in the Museum is trying a ‘pay what you can’ model, so we’ll see how that goes. With Gillies, because of the funding from the RSA, we can’t charge an entry fee. And I don’t really like charging entry fees because I think it puts people off, and that’s the last thing we want to do.”

I wonder if that’s true. Does free admission create a sense that what’s on offer has little value? Ticketing could be a positive element in a marketing package.

“No-one has any money. It’s a real struggle, but if do make money, it will enable us to get the loans, pay the transport costs from London to here. Although I was saying earlier that we are trying to limit the number of loans, a Matisse or a Derain; a Picasso or a Rembrandt; that is a draw, people will come across the door to say they saw a work by a high-profile artist.”

Let’s take money out of the picture for a moment, and ask, discounting it, what could make the most positive change to PAG’s health and wellbeing?

“Visitors!”

Any visitors?

“Yes. We are trying to show that we are inclusive. We are for everyone. This is everyone’s collection. It’s a public collection. Hopefully people will find that there is something for them if they come and visit. There’s nothing better than when we have a big crowd of people in, there’s a buzz and an atmosphere, and you can see people enjoying being in the space.”

“It’s really disheartening when you come in the door and there’s maybe one or two people hanging around the shop and that’s about it. Just to have lots of people in would be amazing, and hopefully to have them discover artwork that they want to come back again and again to see. I don’t know where we are going wrong. We’re free, we’re central… I don’t know if people who have come in before have been put off and think ‘I don’t want to go back there again’. I think that was possibly part of the problem because for such a long time so many of the galleries were closed while we had rewiring carried out, so I don’t know if people came in, saw that there was so little to see and thought ‘I’m not going back there again’.”

“Trying to reassure people that there is plenty to see is important. We are very much open. We try to engage young people too. We have a youth collective who have an exhibition on currently and we are trying to re-engage with audiences. We did previously do a lot of work with other communities; I think we’re trying to re-establish those links… we need to find out what they’re interested in and what they want to see… it is a big problem, and not just for the Gallery. If you asked people in the High Street what they would like to see most, they would probably say footfall.”

It’s the number one issue for Perth. But it’s also the number one issue for every art gallery, is it not?

“Having said that, I did go and see the Degas Exhibition before it closed at the Burrell towards the end of last month, and they had a problem: it was too busy. I think they’d set the tickets every half-hour, so every half-hour there was a huge group of people arriving en masse and all going in. I don’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe they should have said there are X number of people in the Gallery so if you don’t mind queuing and then when two people exit another two can go in, and that would have meant more of a steady flow of people going round. Everyone bunched up at the entrance to the Exhibition, hordes of people all gathered round the one entrance panel, and then moved on, and it was too busy. It didn’t work all that well.”

This is a scale problem – perhaps they’ve over-marketed a relatively small exhibition. And everyone wants to come at the same time.

“I went to see ‘Beyond Impressionism’ last year down in London and I think the ticket was not far off £40 and again it was absolutely mobbed. I think that people are willing to pay, but there are an awful lot who don’t want to. Maybe the fact that there is a price encourages people to think ‘Oh, it must be worth it!’”

It’s an event.

I start wondering if money is a key problem for the public sector, why not take it on? Without investment, the product gets poorer and poorer and less attractive, and then eventually there’ll be nobody coming.

However, let’s change tack a little, Amy has worked in the sector for at least ten years, she must have a decent perspective on how it functions. The sector as a whole employs a lot of people and from the outside they often seem stressed; hassled by budgets, systems and paperwork; that’s me talking. Should the sector think about how it works? Could it become more efficient, more effective, and if so, how?

“Hmmm… I think we need to work together a lot more. I think we could. We do communicate. There’s a Tayside Museums Forum. Maybe we do need to look more widely, have a Scotland-wide forum… and do more cross-promoting, combining forces; together there is potential to be more effective. We could save money, for example, sharing transport costs. We all want each other to succeed. It’s not as though we’re in competition with each other ultimately.”

You couldn’t have got a more flattering review for the Museum than the guy from the Guardian coming from London and saying ‘This is the model for every local museum’. If someone like that is saying this is the model for a local museum, where is the model for a local gallery?

“It’s quite subjective. What one person loves, someone else must hate. The model must be somewhere where visitors go away saying that’s absolutely amazing, and locals are proud of it and keep coming again and again. I personally love the Burrell Collection but is that because I love the collection or the space?”

It’s both. And you also like the idea that every time you go there it’s busy.

“Yes”

And you feel amongst like-minded people. It raises your general well-being.

“It does. There’s a buzz. Whenever I go to the Burrell there’s a buzz. There are people congregating in the foyer around the Warwick Vase, there’s people in the café laughing and talking about what they’ve just been to see; the gift shop has people buying postcards of their favourite picture…”

The whole experience is life-enhancing, it makes you feel that life is better than when you went in. It seems to me that that should be the objective of every gallery. The way they exhibit, the way it’s lit… I think the Burrell is a great model.

“Me too”

Let’s talk about the Museum and Art Gallery sector in Scotland; let’s say in twenty years’ time: what could it look like; and then, what are the dangers?

“If you take all of the public collections, what we have in Scotland is world class, it’s phenomenal.  I think we need to shout about it louder, and do more to promote it. The danger is that when budgets are cut, arts are generally the first to go, and there’s a very real danger that things will continue to be squeezed. Although I don’t see venues closing, what I could see happening more is fewer exhibitions, longer exhibitions. I think the likes of the V&A have announced that they’ll have one exhibition per year; and I think there’s potential that freelance curators will be brought in to oversee these exhibitions. The danger is that you’ll lose the expertise that people have of the collections.  If you don’t have the likes of me looking after the collection and you just bring a freelance person in to curate a display, and someone is researching an exhibition with only a short time to do it, you’re not getting an in-depth and deep dive into a subject. There’s maybe not so much knowledge to be shared.”

The sector needs to think about what they have to do to survive and flourish. If a strength is a deep knowledge of the collection and another is connectivity with all sorts of skilled and experienced people, somehow the professionals need to be using those strengths to get more people through the door.

One objective must surely be to create a public sense of dynamism. How many times can you come and see the same exhibition? And there is this phrase that people use, when they say “they’ve done the Art Gallery” or “they’ve done the Museum”. And once they’ve done it, that’s it. They don’t see these as places with changing programmes.

“I think that’s an issue that many people picked up on, especially with the Museum. You’ve got your permanent displays, albeit switched around a bit, and we’re trying to bring people in with temporary displays, but the temporary exhibition space is not big. It doesn’t give us scope for a big blockbuster exhibition. It is a very real issue that once people have been, will they want to keep coming back over and over again? It’s the same here at the Gallery. There will be an odd picture that people want to come back and look at, but how many times will they come back to look at it? Probably not on a weekly basis.”

Absolutely not. So what activities and events or changes can you make, so that people think, ‘I need to go back in there…’. If you went back to Marks and Spencer and every time they had the same thing, you would stop going.

“That is an issue that we have with capacity. There’s only me, and the exhibitions team to do an install, and a lot of my time now is taken up with researchers, funding applications etc… so to try and find the time to re-do the exhibition, we just don’t have it. Time to select the objects, hang them; time to write the labels… it is a real issue. You’re totally right. You’ve almost hit the nail on the head. Especially the likes of now, the tourist season is over, we’re really looking at generally local visitors only. If you’ve seen the exhibition, what is going to bring people back again? It’s not that we’ve got an amazing café that’s got the best scones in town, or such a brilliant shop that people are going to come in and do their Christmas shopping here”.

It’s the core product that’s the main thing. People are going to come in because you’ve got things happening and they feel that it’s an interesting and exciting environment to be in, and that you’ve got enough (to see). The thing about the Burrell is that you could go in there and just look at the tapestries, or the Greek statues or the Medieval French doorways, they’ve got so much…

“I would go there just to look at the Warwick Vase.”

Perth Art Gallery hasn’t got that opportunity. They haven’t got that scale. So it’s all about somehow increasing the turnover of things happening.

“It’s disheartening. I’ve found that a lot, especially at the Fergusson where I would spend a long time researching, writing labels, arranging the objects, and putting on a really nice looking show, and then you get 40 visitors for the week coming in. You think: ‘Why?’ A lot of people have that mindset, which is ‘I’ll go at some point, I’ll go one day’ and they never get round to it. It’s finding that draw to give them the reason to go.”

Make them think that if they don’t go, they’ll miss it. It’s amazing how many people will go to exhibitions on the last day or the second last day.

“I think that’s partly why the Degas was so busy. I think it was the closing weekend, I think it closed on the Monday and we went on the Friday. Of course, you’re going to get a big flurry of people. However, when I went to the exhibition in London it was half way through and there were hordes of people and the National Portrait Gallery was the same: full of people.”

These are tourist and metropolitan cities, but Perth is in a different situation. The unique sales proposition for Perth is access. All the tourists in Scotland can get to Perth. But you’ve got to have the critical mass. There has to be enough to get people to come, and there has to be enough change to get people to come back. It’s a huge challenge.

“It’s a massive challenge. Once someone has been and they see the semi-permanent exhibition and they ask ‘what’s on next?’ and we say the temporary gallery will have William Gillies and if they don’t like Gillies, they’re not going to come back.”

What’s going to happen in Gallery Three?

“Because it’s empty, we’ll put the William Gillies film in there while the exhibition is on. When we went to Hawick it was just on an iPad, and at 20 minutes long unless there’s just two of you and you’re ready to persist and watch it on the iPad, it’s not ideal and so it’s quite nice to show it in a proper situation. Longer term, hopefully it will be ‘dec-art’”.

“I’m keen to get more decorative art on display. There are glass enthusiasts, silver enthusiasts, and there’s very little of that on display at the moment. I’d like to try and have some more exhibitions that do integrate the collections more. In the past we’ve had landscape paintings on display and in the centre of the gallery we had a collection of our ducks. Birds you might have found within the landscapes. The first thing that many people ask when they come in is ‘where are all of your animals?’ That’s what people like to see, especially families and wee ones. I’ve got a six-year-old, and trying to get him to engage in Modern Scots… it’s tricky!”

“That’s why we have a big ‘Hands on Art’ area. We really had to fight to keep that space, because it does bring people in, brings families in. In holidays they’re looking for ways to cheaply entertain their children, and we have this area where they can bring their kids. Whether they then progress from that area through to the Galleries…

Probably never! And if you want to encourage families you discourage other people.

“It’s that fine balance. It’s that sweet spot where you are appealing to everyone. I think that’s what we have found. I think we were prepared for visitor numbers to drop when the museum moved, because more people are interested in the Museum, than they are in the Gallery.”

Perhaps that’s not necessarily the case. Isn’t it just that the Museum is new, and the Gallery isn’t? You don’t have to spend much time wondering who has the budget right now. The consequence for the Art Gallery is that the numbers are not going to look so good, so there needs to be some pretty smart thinking, I guess.

“Yes. That’s where we are at. What can we do to bring people a short five-minute walk from the Museum over here? It’s not a big building.  We’re trying to be a bit experimental, looking at colour schemes, taking inspiration from other places, seeing what works elsewhere. What are they doing right that we’re maybe not? Architecturally, it’s a really lovely building that we’re sitting in.”

“We’re trying to get more of what we have on display. Long term, we’re going to be open upstairs. First of all, we’re going to put photography upstairs. The way that we see it is that unlike an object, say the doublet that’s on display down the road, a photograph or an online image won’t suffice: you want to see the actual physical thing; whereas with photography, because you can digitise it and display it quite readily, we can have iPads down here for people who are unable to make it upstairs, so they can still see the exhibition. They can see the show on a screen downstairs, and it’s not that different, whereas I think when it comes to things like taxidermy or costume you want to see the physical object…”

Otherwise you might just sit at home…

“During the pandemic a lot of galleries did put exhibitions on line and there was a great surge to look at them when it first started and then the traffic to these sites just plummeted because nothing compares to the real thing. You don’t get a sense of the scale of things or the historical significance in the same way as when you’re standing right next to, say, a caltrop that came from the Battle of Bannockburn, seven hundred years ago. There’s not that immediacy. I think that’s part of the plan, and looking to get more decorative art objects on display, but it’s trying to find out ways in which we can do that.”

“Again, we’re limited with the number of display cases we have, and the space that we have, so we need to be smart in the way we do that, because if we stick display cases all over the place, we create accessibility issues for people. It’s trying to think through these problems.”

“We are trying to do things to make it more appealing and engaging.  As mentioned before: to have films of artists discussing their work; maybe more interactives that families and children can engage with, so it makes it somewhat fun for them and might entice them in… whether they’ll stay or come back.  You want things that aren’t going to annoy other people that just want to go and have a look at the paintings. I think that’s an issue we have down at the Museum. There’s a trebuchet in the Gallery there. Some people are trying to leisurely stroll around the displays and you’ve got kids hurtling bean bags from the trebuchet. They’re being entertained by it, so it’s trying to strike that balance as well.”

Two hours of honest conversation and free-flowing dialogue with Amy Fairley, in which we knocked around ideas but kept returning to the same ones, coming back to questions with elusive answers. Entertainment or art; families or art enthusiasts; local or national interests; playgrounds, tourist attractions, archives, or research institutions; pop culture tastes or educated palettes; value the work, or make it free and accessible; where are the sweet spots here? Do they exist?

The lay-person might say: ‘What are public art galleries for in 2024? Who are they for?’ Answering these two questions with clarity and brevity is perhaps the way to unlock funds, attract audiences, and change perspectives. And we should expect the answers to be different in every case. All things for everyone discarded. Perth’s choices are imminent.

Two weeks after the interview, Perth Art Gallery felt reborn. All hesitation and questioning can be set aside, because the opening of the Gillies exhibition has had a transformational impact. The Gallery looks stunning. The Gillies show, hung with bravery and pzazz, chimes really well with everything else in the building. The ambition is worn on the sleeve. Perth Art Gallery is a Gallery of national and international interest and should attract art lovers from all over the world. It should make local people proud of their home town. It’s setting a standard which points towards a flourishing future: and it’s a sweet spot.

Roger Spence

Notes

Note 1: It’s almost one hundred years since the Bridge of Earn textile merchant, Robert Brough, left a bequest of £30k (£2.3m in 2024 money) to Perth Town Council to build an art gallery.  He died in 1926. The bequest also included £5k (£400k in today’s money) to be spent on fine art to go into the gallery, and twenty paintings from his personal collection. He seems to have had no intention of supporting anything except art, but the town councillors used the opportunity to resurrect the Museum of Antiquities that had been closed since 1915, and by the time they had bought the land in George Street in 1929, they were already planning to transfer their collections of Natural History there as well as the “Antiquities”. Despite public objections to the use of the bequest for non-art purposes, the Town Council held its line and the final public act of the seriously ill Provost in 1932 was to lay the Foundation stone not of the new Art Gallery, but of the Art Gallery and Museum. By the time it was opened in 1935 by the future King George VI, the majority of the space was taken by the Museum element.

Note 2: Alice Strang, independent curator and art historian.

Note 3: Effie Millais (nee Gray) (1828-1897) was born and died at Bowerswell, the Gray family home on Kinnoull Hill, Perth. She married John Ruskin there in 1848, but the marriage was famously never consummated, and was annulled, allowing her to marry John Everett Millais, the English painter and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. The couple lived in London and had eight children, but they spent many holidays in Perthshire, renting country houses.