Museum · Kolkata, West Bengal
Victoria Memorial Hall
A white marble memorial on the Maidan, built between 1906 and 1921 and now a museum. Its paintings record how India was seen, and staged, in the colonial era.
See first
- Thomas and William Daniell: the largest single collection of their work
- Vasily Vereshchagin's painting of the Prince of Wales entering Jaipur in 1876
- Frank Salisbury's twelve lunettes in the rotunda
- The Victoria Gallery's royal portraits, copies after Winterhalter, Frith and Salisbury
The memorial was Lord Curzon’s idea, built to the memory of Queen Victoria. William Emerson designed it; Martin & Co. of Calcutta built it, with work on the superstructure starting in 1910. It opened to the public in December 1921, and it stands in 64 acres of garden. It is now run as a museum under the Ministry of Culture.
The reason to go, beyond the building, is the Daniells. Thomas Daniell, an English landscape painter, spent seven years in India with his nephew William, and the two published several series of aquatints of the country. The memorial holds the largest single collection of their work.
Elsewhere the collection is frank about its purpose. Salisbury’s lunettes show the Queen’s life in twelve set pieces. Vereshchagin, a Russian, painted the Prince of Wales arriving in Jaipur in 1876, and the procession is the subject. Read it as a record of how power wished to look.
