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 wo
rk 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. Chisholm the then Consulting State Architect and Major R.N. 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. The pure gallery building is somewhat smaller and designed in a simple European brick style, but it has Indian columns and open pavilions on the roof. The two building are connected by a covered bridge passage. The total floor area of both the buildings is about 40,000 sq. The foundation stone of the museum building was laid in 1887 and the building was completed in 1894. The construction of the picture gallery building started in 1908 and was completed in 1914.
