Dear John,

THIS WINTER the National Galleries of Scotland are providing, under your leadership, a breathtaking range of art shows. It's a rich season in Edinburgh for any art lover.

My question is how anyone that works normal daily working hours in this city, or outside it, can actually visit these shows during the week.

The National Galleries' opening hours, compared to almost any rival national or international institution, are astonishingly restricted. To take contemporary art to a contemporary audience, we desperately need to catch up.

The National Gallery Complex on the Mound, including the National Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy buildings, is open 10am-5pm every day except Thursdays, when it is open till 7pm – the one "late" night. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street keeps the same hours.

Take a look at the National Gallery in London. Open daily from 10am-6pm – that's an extra hour – and on Wednesday until 9pm. The National Portrait Gallery, right next door, is open until 9pm on Thursday and Friday.

Our Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the neighbouring Dean Gallery close at 5pm every day. The Tate Modern? Open till 6pm, Sunday to Thursday, then Friday and Saturday until 10pm.

Internationally the story is the same – your own former employer, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opens until 10pm every Friday. (It offers video projections, DJs and a bar in the central hall; personally I'd just like to spend the evening with the paintings.)

The irony is that your line-up of exhibitions this winter has never looked better. It is a privilege to live in a city with so much on offer.

It's a short stroll from the 18th-century masterpieces of The Intimate Portrait, at the SNPG, to the punchy, modern canvases by Gerhard Richter on the Mound. Charles Avery, a fast-rising Edinburgh artist whose work revels in imagination and wit, is at the SNGMA.

Edinburgh's art scene doesn't end there, from renaissance masters at the Queen's Gallery to contemporary at the Ingleby. The trouble is that if we really want to make it lively and hip, a central part of city life, we have to create some of that buzz at night.

Sure, late opening would bring extra staffing costs, balanced against the number of extra visitors. But late openings are for people working in the city, who can't get away in the day.

With the Richter show, the galleries expect about 12,000 visitors over nine weeks. That's fewer than 200 people a day, on average. On a quiet weekday morning, there may be fewer visitors than staff. The upfront costs of this exhibition are already considerable. Why not spend a little more on opening late?

Other Scottish art organisations strive to cater to modern lifestyles. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra's programme of classics at 6pm, one-hour concerts aimed at the end of the working day, are dubbed Cl@six.

Opening till Thursday night at 7pm is frankly a figleaf. It's not late enough to be meaningful and, even you don't want to shop, you have to fight through the shoppers to get to the gallery.

All the major galleries and museums in London do at least one evening of late opening. Many have made a feature of them: the Victoria and Albert Museum's Friday nights are famous. The British Museum is open daily until 5:30pm and every Thursday and Friday until 8:30pm.

Lamentably, our own National Museum of Scotland closes daily at 5pm. Not very impressive, either – perhaps the £70 million revamp now underway could be the cue for some changes.

Yes, the NGS does do some evening concerts and talks and has even experimented with singles' nights. The events tend to be rare, little advertised and not the same as just opening the galleries up late one or two nights a week. They certainly don't rival the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the all-night cultural festival with free admission to galleries and museums that has spawned imitators worldwide. London tried to do it, but has opted for a "Lates" evening in May instead, critically offering a chance to see great masterpieces after dark.

Opening our galleries up later in the evenings is the best way I can think of to show the audience how much we want them to enjoy Scotland's wonderful and diverse art scene.


Yours sincerely, Tim Cornwell