Albert Hall Museum main gate

The story of Albert Hall Museum main gate

The Albert Hall Museum is the oldest museum of the state and the state museum of Rajasthan. What you are looking at here is the museum’s main gate, in Ram Niwas Garden outside the city wall, opposite New Gate, and the whole building is a fine example of Indo-Saracenic architecture.

It began with a change of plan. Maharaja Ram Singh initially wanted the building to be a town hall, but his successor, Madho Singh II, decided it should be a museum for the art of Jaipur and included it as part of the new Ram Niwas Garden. The foundation stone was laid on 6 February 1876, during the visit of King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, and the building was opened as a public museum in 1887.

Samuel Swinton Jacob designed it, with Mir Tujumool Hoosein assisting, while Colonel Tomas H. Hendley was given responsibility for curating the collection. The founders collected the best examples of many crafts and sometimes even got some pieces manufactured, so this was not just a building to hold objects, but a museum shaped around a deliberate idea of what Jaipur’s art should represent.

The structure itself is made of marble and stone. It was expanded specifically with a museum in mind. On the outside walls you can look for painted scenes from ancient civilizations. In the courtyard above, there are extracts from religious texts, including the Quran, the Bible, and Indian epics, inscribed on the walls. There are also six scenes from Mahabharata and Ramayana in colourful paintings, copied from the 16th century manuscript of Razmnama, the Persian translation of Mahabharata, by 19th century copyists.

Britannica describes it as one of the best 19th-century museums for the variety of its collections. The museum was renovated in 2008 and reopened as one of the most advanced museums in India. It is also called the Government Central Museum.

Today it is a State Protected Monument. If you are standing at the gate, the best thing to do is pause and read the building as a whole: the palace-like form, the painted surfaces, and the inscriptions together show why this was designed as both a museum and a statement about Jaipur’s culture.