Carla van de Puttelaar: Facing the Law: Portraits Past & Present

Carla van de Puttelaar brings Facing the Law: Portraits Past & Present to the City Art Centre from Saturday 22 May 2027, running through to Sunday 10 October. It's a long run, so there's plenty of time to fit it in over the summer.

The exhibition is built around two very different sets of images. The first is a large series of around 85 contemporary portraits of women working in the law, which van de Puttelaar spent 2023 to 2025 photographing across Scotland. Alongside them is a smaller group of 17th and 18th-century oil paintings by David Scougall, Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn. Putting them in the same room lets you see the two side by side, the modern faces of the Scottish legal profession held up against the old portraiture of the same country.

Van de Puttelaar is a Dutch photographer, curator and art historian, and this show sits right where those three things overlap. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 1996 and earned a PhD in Art History from Utrecht University in 2017. Her research has a strong Scottish thread: her two-volume study Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 came out in 2021 and was picked up by journals like The Burlington Magazine, and in 2025 she published a monograph on the seventeenth-century portraitist Salomon Mesdach. She's currently writing a monograph on the British Baroque portraitist John Michael Wright, chairs the Scottish Society for Art History, and sits on the board of Museum Martena in Franeker.

Entry is free, and the City Art Centre is at 2 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DE. The exhibition runs from 22 May until 10 October 2027.