He had a quick scout for pictures on the web and likes a official photo strip by @NatGalleriesSco on Twitter. Mark you the best Higgs portrait lurks in the Edinburgh Informatics Centre!

Looking at gallery levels where the faces look back.

According he joined in one of those totally illuminating evenings, where so many of the historical and modern portraiture faces hanging on walls, or to be accessed in the wonderful information screens, or seen as sculptures, could be also be observed in the tilt of jaw, the eye-set or nose formations, echoing back from the viewing visitors walking and talking the living history rooms.

It really is amazing to use the information screens and pull up centuries of Scottish scientists or poets;or see if your favourite heros were painted from a viewed 'right' or 'left' faced approach.

And if for nothing else, you should try to visit just to see the Lavery paintings
John Lavery was born in Belfast, attended the Haldane Academy, in Glasgow, the Julian Academy in Paris in the 1880’s. In 1888 he painted Queen Victoria during one of her state visits to the Glasgow International Exhibition and later was a war painter.

His recent lovely My Studio Door, Tangier  (shades of Ian Fleming's house door in Cullen) which sold for £480,000,  pales to the delightful frivolity it was set against a set of four paintings, normally housed by the Imperial War Museum in London, and on loan currently to the National Portrait Gallery for a year.

Women's war work in oils

You only have to look at the sunlit babies of Lady Henry's creche, set as an innocence amongst the amazing paintings of women recorded working the hydraulic press for Naval gun manufacture, making armaments in East Pilton, Edinburgh, or capped for cleanliness, in the Clyde Shipyards slaving over gun barrels, to realise that the history of war was a recorded, but often now forgotten, hard working manufacturing business for women.

If you were looking for some nice frivolities to buy for Christmas, Gaberlunzie can say that the shop, and of course the post cards are delightful, and even if not inexpensive, lovely browsing and buying places.

 It's quite interesting to study your artist and writer hero's and suddenly discover that three out of four are right-faced views.. though of course on the  wonderful information screens (above right), the faces are left viewed!!

 Rennie MacIntosh, Joan Redpath, Robert Louis Stevenson and Compton McKenzie - three right to one left view.

So if you are now starting to wonder what sort of New Year resolutions you can commit to, one that will be a postive  indulgence,  and Gaberlunzie reckons the best one that you could make, is to take, alas, that tram obstructed road route way to the once easy flowing traffic road of Queen Street and go wander in the space and place that is the wonderfullly renewed National Portrait Gallery.

Colour, light and texture: on the second floor and looking down into the courtyard