Salar Jung Museum which was established in 1951, is one of the three national museums. During the reign of Nizams of Hyderabad, the prime ministers who belonged to the Salar Jung family used to collect many antiques and artefacts during their lifetime. These collections were kept in their ancestral palace, the ‘Diwan Diodi’. It is these priceless collections that were shifted to the present art museum. Nawab Mir Yousuf Ali, also known as Salar Jung III contributed most of the artefacts to this museum. This magnificent museum has a large collection of sculptures and paintings from Europe, Middle-East nations, Indian kingdoms like Mauryan empire to Mughal empire. Unlike most of the other museums, you can click pictures of the exhibits here by paying a fee. The exhibits also include Indian paintings, carvings, glass works, dress materials, ivory works, Rebecca’s idols from Bible, walking sticks, weapons and paintings of Raja Ravi Verma. The museum has galleries for different civilizations like Chinese gallery, Japanese gallery, European gallery, Egyptian and Syrian gallery. There are more than forty halls that display carpets, clocks, manuscripts, silver antiques, coins etc. Salar Jung Museum is world’s largest one-man art collection thanks to Salar Jung III
