Baroda Museum And Picture Gallery

The Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery located at Sayajibaug was founded in 1887 by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad. Created for the welfare and education his subjects, his foresight and taste were responsible for the museum’s unique and varied collection. He procured the priceless items himself or specially entrusted the work to various scholars and art connoisseurs. Thanks to his dedication the Baroda museum today possesses some very rare exhibits and enjoys an international reputation for being one of the best in the East.

The foundation stone of the museum building was laid in 1887 and the building was completed in 1894. The construction of the picture gallery building started in 1908 and was completed in 1914, but the gallery could be opened only in 1921 as the World War delayed the transport of the collection of European paintings to India to Baroda.

The museum and the picture gallery are two separate two-storied buildings built in the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture. They were designed by two English architects, R.F. Chisholm – the then Consulting State Architect – and Major R.N. Ment. The general outline of the museum building is in conformity with the traditional local Maratha architecture of wooden framework filled with brick walls. But the ground floor has the pure European style, including a cornice decorated with a plaster copy of a Parthenon frieze. The south porch rising on a vast flight of steps is decorated with early and later Mughal forms. The pure gallery building is somewhat smaller and designed in a simple European brick style, but it has Indian columns and open pavilions on the roof. The two building are connected by a covered bridge passage. The total floor area of both the buildings is about 40,000 sq. ft. The second-phase extension of the museum building is presently in progress.