Tata’s European collection

The Ratan Tata Gallery of European Paintings inside the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, which had been closed for renovation since May 2011, reopened for the public on August 28, 2012. The Gallery now has a mini library, an activity desk and a detailed catalog of the 210 paintings that were bequeathed to the museum from Tata’s personal collection, reported Hindustan Times (HT) on August 28, 2012. Ratan, son of Jamsetji, the illustrious founder of the Tata industrial empire, passed away in 1918. The catalog will provide descriptions of the paintings and details of their provenance. The mini library will have about 40 volumes along with periodicals on European art and the Tata collection, notes the newspaper.

Museum director Sabyasachi Mukherjee informed HT that "the biggest challenge that the curators in a museum face is getting viewers to engage with the art on display.” To this end the Gallery has a desk where visitors are encouraged to try their hand at reproducing the paintings using paper, pencils and colors provided for the exercise. "If a viewer is physically engaged in an activity, he or she will be more interested in learning about the work,” Mukherjee told HT.

(Clockwise from r): Lady in a Garden with a Parasol; Horses Drawing Fishing Boat; Woman Feeding Poultry. Images courtesy Trustees, Prince of Wales Museum

Only batches of 26 paintings will be displayed at any given time and these will be rotated every six months, notes HT. The old fluorescent lights have been removed and special illumination will ensure that the paintings are not damaged over a period of time by the heat generated by the earlier lighting, curator Dilip Ranade informed HT.

Mumbai Mirror (MM) of August 25, 2012, revealed that in addition to the old paintings, the 3,000 sq ft Gallery will also display eight new artworks which had, until recently, been "stashed away in the storage room of the Museum.”