Place · presidency museum · India
Government Museum, Chennai
Also known as Madras Museum, Government Museum Egmore, Egmore Museum, Central Museum, Madras, Pantheon complex
The Government Museum at Egmore, the Madras Museum, was started in 1851 and is described as the second oldest museum in India after the Indian Museum in Kolkata. It began with a gift of 1,100 geological specimens from the Madras Literary Society and moved in 1854 to the Pantheon, an eighteenth-century estate of public assembly rooms. Its six buildings and 46 galleries hold Chola-period bronzes, one of the largest collections of Roman coins outside Europe and paintings by Raja Ravi Varma.
- Date
- 1851–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.071, 80.257
Worth knowing
Its first officer-in-charge, Surgeon Edward Balfour, also set up the first zoo of Madras in the museum grounds in 1855; the Connemara Public Library, opened in 1896, stands in the same complex.
Connections (3)
- Site withinMadras / Chennai
The Government Museum stands on Pantheon Road in Egmore, central Chennai, in a complex shared with the Connemara Public Library and the National Art Gallery. The site was granted as an estate by the governor of Madras in 1778 and later used by a committee that regulated the city's public amusements; the museum, first opened on College Road in Nungambakkam in 1851, moved there in 1854. Chennai's Wikipedia entry lists the museum among the city's landmark colonial-era buildings.
- AnalogueIndian Museum, Kolkata
The Government Museum at Egmore, started in 1851, is described as the second oldest museum in India after the Indian Museum in Kolkata, founded in 1814. Both grew out of the learned societies of the Company's presidency capitals: the Asiatic Society of Bengal, whose collection Nathaniel Wallich turned into the Calcutta museum, and the Madras Literary Society, whose gift of 1,100 geological specimens began the Madras collection. The Madras museum moved to the Pantheon in 1854; the Calcutta museum's building on Chowringhee was completed in 1875.
- Associated withRaja Ravi Varma
The National Art Gallery within the Government Museum complex at Egmore, built in Indo-Saracenic style, houses rare European and Asian paintings, including works by Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). Born at Kilimanoor in the princely state of Travancore, Ravi Varma widened his reach by making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which drew ordinary people into the fine arts and helped shape popular artistic taste.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Government Museum, Chennai" and "Chennai".
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