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A Note on the Collection: Jehangir Nicholson collected from all regions of India: the Bengal School, the Calcutta Group, from the artists working around Baroda, Delhi, Bhopal, from the Madras School, South India, and most well known, his collection of artists from Bombay. His collection tells the story of many movements in India, but perhaps to him the most important was to collect works that could trace an individual artist through different phases of work, whether a phase of affinity with a movement or a phase of private struggle, collecting the anomaly along with the icon. He does not seem to have imposed a theme for his collection other than this. In an age when women artists still had to fight for prominence, Nicholson was an avid collector of their work, and he opened his collection and was patron of one of the first serious studies of contemporary Indian women artists published by Marg.

A Note on the Collector: Jehangir KS Nicholson (1915-2001) was a photographer from the age of 11, a trained chartered accountant and the last heir of a cotton gin and press, Breul and Co. (est. 1863). For the year of 1978, he was appointed the sheriff of Bombay. His daring adventurous spirit, irrepressible sense of play and humour, is captured in his red racing rally helmet, which has come to the museum. Nicholson bought his first painting in 1968, after his wife died. An early patron of modern art in India, he also ventured into the contemporary, excited at the shifts and turns in Indian art of the 90s. He continued collecting until 2001.

As early as 1976, Nicholson founded a museum gallery for his collection at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). Twenty years later, when the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) opened, he sat on the advisory board. In 1998, he curated his collection for an exhibition titled Collector's Eye with the then director, Saryu Doshi, at the NGMA.

History of the East Annex: The Prince of Wales Museum of Bombay was built by George Wittet at the turn of the last century and opened in 1922. It has since been re-named Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalya. It was made in the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture, of jalis, verandas, domes, wooden arched pillars, china mosaic terraces, and Edwardian floor patterns. In 1938 Gregson Bately & King made the eastern annex wing, using Kurla Stone and Basalt from Bombay's Malad quarries. The East wing annex was built to increase storage space for the museum. In the 90s Rahul Mehrotra converted the annex into a gallery space, by adding a veranda and sky-lit atrium to allow better circulation and access. In 2010, Ratan J Batliboy designed the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation as two spaces on the second floor of the East annex, on either side of the atrium. A display gallery is used for changing exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Mirroring this space across the atrium is a space devoted to research, which contains visible storage for sculpture and paintings, the office, library, and Jehangir Nicholson's archive of photography.