Glasgow’s Treasure Palace

Artist Lachlan Goudie visits Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to explore a collection that he has loved since he was a boy.

Kelvingrove is Glasgow’s most important and popular cultural institution, a treasure palace that is home to a vast array of art and artefacts from across the world and across time. It has been a hugely influential part of Lachlan’s life, the single most important collection in shaping his ambition to become a painter.

Since the age of 12, Lachlan has taken his pencils and brushes to Kelvingrove to enter the Glasgow Museums Annual Art Competition. Among his prizewinning entries was a drawing of one of the stars of Kelvingrove’s collection, Sir Roger the Elephant, a taxidermy giant who has stood in the museum since its opening in 1902. Lachlan begins his tour of the museum with a visit to his old friend before moving on to other objects in the collection that fired his childhood imagination.

Rembrandt’s Man in Armour was the first painting Lachlan felt inexorably drawn towards as a boy, and one he has spent a lifetime trying to emulate. From his unique perspective as a practising artist, Lachlan’s exploration of the collection includes other masterpieces, including Salvador Dali’s controversial Christ of St John of the Cross, Van Gogh’s celebrated portrait of Alexander Reid and John Duncan Fergusson’s groundbreaking experiments in fauvist colour.

Lachlan examines the artistic processes underpinning these extraordinary paintings as well as exploring the astonishing and heartbreaking works by the lesser-known artist Marianne Grant, created at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Grant’s drawings force us to confront one of the most shocking moments in world history and sit alongside other objects in the museum that have renewed resonance in the context of today’s global events.

Revisiting an institution he has treasured all his life, in this film Lachlan will re-see objects with fresh eyes, revealing the power of Kelvingrove’s extraordinary collection to enlighten our history and to change the way we look at the world.