National Museum to host first exhibit by private donor

In a first since its inception, the National Museum here will host an exhibition featuring artefacts from a private donor's collection, an official said Tuesday.

The month-long "A Passionate Eye" exhibition will open Friday and showcase around 100 works from the private collection of art connoisseur C.L. Bharany and his father which they collected from across India.

Sculptures in stone, bronze and wood, besides paintings on paper and cloth, manuscripts and textiles from over the past two millennia will be shown in this exhibition curated by three experts.

"It thus acknowledges one of many people who have helped gather items of our cultural heritage," National Museum director general Venu V. said in a statement.

"It highlights the role private collectors have played in enriching the nation's public museums," he added.

Giles Tillotson, one of the curators of the exhibition, said the collection has great finesse.

"What is striking is not just the range and quality of the works they have assembled. Their contributions to the work of scholars and of the country's museums are immense," he said.

Tillotson co-curated this exhibition with Pramod Kumar K.G. and Mrinalini Venkateswaran of Eka Archiving Services, a cataloguing and archiving company.

The exhibition, designed by Siddhartha Chatterjee, concludes Aug 14.