Jaganmohan Palace

About Jaganmohan Palace

In the middle of old Mysore city, a short walk from the City Bus Stand, stands a building that has quietly worn three completely different identities over its lifetime — royal residence, seat of government, and finally one of South India's most respected art galleries. Jaganmohan Palace was raised in 1861 during the reign of Krishna Raja Wadiyar III, at almost exactly the same time as the original wooden Mysore Palace, and the two buildings have been tied to each other's fortunes ever since.

That relationship became more than architectural coincidence in 1897, when the old wooden palace caught fire during the wedding of the elder princess and burned down. With no palace to live in, the royal family moved into Jaganmohan and stayed there for a decade and a half, right through some of the most consequential ceremonies in modern Mysore history — Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV's own coronation was held here, along with the daily durbar, the grand Dasara durbar, and even early convocations of the newly founded University of Mysore.

Once the new Amba Vilas palace was ready in 1912 and the royal family finally moved on, Jaganmohan did not simply become surplus property. Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV converted it into an art gallery instead, filling it with roughly two thousand paintings, and after 1955 it was formally renamed the Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery in honour of the last ruling Maharaja. What visitors walk into today, in other words, is a building that has hosted a coronation and now hosts a permanent exhibition of some of the finest painting collections in the country.

Entry is ticketed, unlike most of the temples and heritage sites nearby, with separate rates for Indian and foreign visitors and a discounted slab for children — modest by international museum standards, but worth budgeting for since it is easy to forget when planning a Mysore itinerary built mostly around free temple visits. The gallery keeps generous hours through the week, including weekends, which makes it one of the easiest heritage stops in the city to slot into a tight schedule.

Photography rules also differ from many temple stops nearby, so it is worth checking with gallery staff at the entrance before you raise a camera in front of any particular canvas.

Architecture & The Art Gallery

The palace itself is a three-storey building raised in a traditional Hindu architectural idiom, and its three external doors are carved with the Dashavataram — the ten avatars of Vishnu — a detail worth pausing over before you even step inside. Once through the doors, wooden staircases lead up past interior murals that include a painted family tree of the Wadiyar dynasty, rendered using vegetable dyes rather than the synthetic pigments that would take over Indian mural work later in the century.

The gallery holds close to two thousand works, and the range of artists represented is genuinely unusual for a regional collection: alongside Indian masters you will find works attributed to the Russian painter Nikolai Roerich and to Peter Paul Rubens, hung not far from Rabindranath Tagore's own paintings and pieces by Mysore-based artists like M. Veerappa and Subbukrishna. The single most photographed piece is almost certainly S.L. Haldankar's "Glow of Hope," better known locally as "The Lamp Lady," alongside an ornate French musical calendar clock that draws its own small crowd.

Raja Ravi Varma and his brother Raja Raja Varma are represented particularly well, with roughly a dozen works between them spanning mythological scenes — Krishna and Balarama, Draupadi, Ravana striking down Jatayu — alongside genre paintings of court musicians and domestic life. The gallery's Dasara durbar painting deserves its own mention: look closely and you will find somewhere between two and three hundred individually rendered faces packed into a single canvas, each one distinct. Beyond the paintings, cases of royal furniture, antique clocks, musical instruments and carved sandalwood and ivory work round out the collection, and audio guides are available if you want the fuller story behind each gallery.

Beyond the two headline pieces, the Ravi Varma brothers' work fills out a good stretch of one gallery wing on its own — mythological scenes like Krishna and Balarama, Draupadi in the Kaurava court, and Ravana striking down Jatayu hang alongside quieter genre pieces such as a mother nursing her child and a group of court musicians mid-performance. One large canvas, generally credited jointly, is worth slowing down for: the main figure is said to be Ravi Varma's own brushwork, with the background completed by his brother Raja Varma, a small detail that becomes obvious once you know to look for the shift in style.