Salar Jung Museum

The current Salarjung Museum was founded in the year 1968, before which it was housed in the Diwan Deodi from 1951 onwards. The museum, founded on the basis of the collection of a single man, Salar Jung III, now attracts nearly ten lakh visitors annually.

The museum contains over 43,000 art objects and though he was educated informally, Salar Jung Ill built up an enormous library consisting of 9,000 manuscripts and 47,000 printed books. The museum houses various galleries including paintings, sculptures, handicrafts, manuscripts, objects such as clocks, walking sticks, among many more.

Among the noted items in the museum, there are two sculptures – the “Veiled Rebecca,” a delicate marble statue of a woman seen through her veil carved by Giovanni Maria Benzoni, and “Marguerite and Mephistopheles”, a sculpture carved from one single block of wood by an unknown French sculptor. Another popular attraction is the British ‘Bracket Clock’, which has a mechanical device with a miniature toy figure that strikes a gong for every hour of the day.