art & culture in aberdeen

Aberdeen International Youth Festival

The International Youth Festival is widely recognised as one of Aberdeen's most prestigious cultural events, bringing together around 1000 young people from the world's finest youth orchestras

With its roots in the 1960s, the festival originally moved around Europe before settling in Aberdeen in 1982. Since then, its popularity has rocketed.

Apart from fulfilling the founder's wish of including a greater variety of cultures, it now incorporates two summer schools for individual musicians and dancers, a fine-arts programme and a multi-arts project involving local young disabled people.

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Opened in 1885 and designed by local architect Alexander Marshall McKenzie, the popular Aberdeen Art Gallery has impressive collections of modern art, as well as work by the Impressionists and much more.

In addition to 18th-century portraits by Raeburn, Hogarth, Ramsay and Reynolds and powerful 20th-century works by Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Francis Bacon, the gallery also has paintings by Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, while representatives of the Glasgow Boys include Sir John Lavery's The Tennis Party and Sir James Guthrie's To Pastures New. It also supports new and emerging artists in its enterprising programme of special exhibitions throughout the year, with new acquisitions occasionally displayed in the imposing Centre Court, with its rose and grey granite columns.

The gallery is one of four operated by Aberdeen City Council, the others being the Aberdeen Maritime Museum, overlooking the harbour, Provost Skene's House (a 16th-century town house with a 17th-century suite of rooms inside) and the Tolbooth (one of the best preserved 17th-century Scottish gaols).