The Kelvingrove Museum (or, Stuffed Elephants, Spitfires, and Salvador Dali)

Since it's been a few days since I've written anything, I'll split it into two posts.  On Thursday I went to the Kelvingrove Museum, which is the big all-inclusive art, science, and culture museum in Glasgow.  The museum is in a pretty amazing building that opened in 1901, at the Glasgow International Exhibition.

 The grand front entrance of the Kelvingrove Museum.

This is a view of the main hall.  You can see the pipe organ when you walk in.  Originally this housed a sculpture gallery, with topiary and nudes, but the gallery was hit by a bomb in the second world war and that was the end of that.  However, the damage was somewhat minimal and much of the building's interior is still original.

I found the museum to be interesting but extremely eclectic.  It has six large wings (two each on three levels), and they seem to be only vaguely related.  They have a nice collection of French Impressionist paintings, in a hall right next to a great exhibit on the early inhabitants of Scotland.  On the ground floor, you walk from a women's rights exhibit into a room about ancient Egypt.  Egypt is followed by a beautiful ichthyosaur fossil and a stuffed circus elephant with a real Spitfire hanging above it.

 A prehistoric giant reindeer.  This thing is huge.

And a taxidermy haggis, for those of you who don't know where it comes from...

The museum people also have a strange sense of humor.  In the middle of the native Scottish wildlife exhibit, next to the grouse, was a bottle of Famous Grouse with no explanation whatsoever.  There was a packaged haggis next to the haggis, too. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Art Nouveau darling of Glasgow, also has a whole room devoted to his (and his wife Margaret's) interior designs.  And Salvador Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross is also there, although I must admit it was not at all to my taste.

All in all, the museum is definitely worth seeing, and they have some pretty neat stuff in their collection, but it's certainly on the eclectic side.