Baroda Museum

The Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery located at Sayaji Baug was founded by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III. The H.H.Sayajirao III (1863-1939 AD) keen lover of peace and prosperity based on education and industry in his words “Education was the only leaver by which our country and our people could be moved from the inertia of ages that had weighed them down.” To fulfil this idea, the development work of library services, Kalabhavan, Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya, The Oriental Institute and The Baroda Museum, begins. The Baroda 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. Mant.

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.