The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is now open after a complete restoration that has been ongoing since the museum closed in April 2009. It is the first major renovation that the gallery has had since it opened in 1889 and has cost £17.6m, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The new and improved gallery has sixty per cent more floor space, as areas have been redecorated and opened up, providing exciting new opportunities for innovative exhibitions and a full-scale modernisation of the museum.

The gallery on Queen Street opened again to the public on December 1, and now reflects a timeline of Scottish achievement from the medieval period to the present day. One of the major changes has been the inclusion of photographic portraits and other visual and auditory media, giving the gallery a more contemporary feel and allowing the museum to show off its varied range of Scottish talent, from famous scientists to actors like David Tennant.

These portraits are now housed alongside ones of kings, queens, and a 1966 photograph of Bob Dylan walking along Princes Street.

Before the renovation, the gallery's director James Holloway told BBC News: “You had to be a sort of eminent dead Scot, we’re much more, sort of, relaxed about that, so you can certainly be alive, and really anybody of interest.”

John Leighton, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, told the BBC, “the new Scottish National Portrait Gallery will be a superb setting to showcase rich traditions of Scottish art and photography.

“It is also a forum where issues of history and identity come to life through art, perhaps, above all, it is a place where individual and collective stories and memories come together to create a fascinating and imaginative portrait of a nation.”

Stana Nenadic, lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh has been heavily involved in the restoration of a number of Edinburgh’s public museums and galleries. She told The Student that it was “a beautiful restoration of a much-loved art gallery which combines old with new.” She commented also that it would be nice to see so much more on display, as there has previously not been enough space to exhibit large portions of the museum’s vast collection.

With these changes, the National Portrait Gallery is the second largest collection of portraits in the world.