The Jaipur Gate returns to to Hove Museum & Art Gallery on 3 June 2006 following its extensive refurbishment, including newly completed gilding.
The Jaipur Gate was made for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. It has stood in the grounds of Hove Museum & Art Gallery since 1926, but was dismantled in December 2004 for refurbishment. Specialist conservation work has been undertaken by The Green Oak Carpentry Company and members of the Conservation team for the Royal Pavilion, Libraries & Museums, Brighton & Hove.
Entrance to the Central Avenue of the Indian Section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (Illustrated London News, 17 July 1886).
The Jaipur Gate formed the central portion of the eastern Exhibition Road entrance to the Indian art-ware courts of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held at South Kensington in 1886. The exhibition was opened by Queen Victoria on 4 May 1886 and attracted some 5.5 million visitors.
The Jaipur Gate formed the entry to the Rajputana (now Rajasthan) section of the exhibition. The Maharaja of Jaipur paid for its construction but, although carved and assembled by Indian craftsmen, the gate is a hybrid construction designed by two Englishmen, Colonel Samuel Swinton Jacob (1841-1917) and Surgeon-Major Thomas Holbein Hendley (1847-1917), combining elements found in Mughal and Rajput buildings.
The inscription on the front, in English, Sanskrit and Latin, is the motto of the Maharajas of Jaipur - ‘where virtue is, there is victory’. The Latin inscription on the back reads ‘from the east comes light’.
The gate was originally flanked by side screens, removed from the gate after the exhibition. A portion of one of the screens is now in the Horniman Museum, London.
Following the transfer of the gate to the Imperial Institute after the closure of the exhibition, it was donated to Hove Museum in 1926 and erected in the garden. The gate formed the backdrop to the visit of the current Maharaja of Jaipur in 1986, when he visited Hove to mark India’s Independence celebrations.
In 2004, the gate was dismantled for conservation, structural reinforcement and weatherproofing by specialist contractors The Green Oak Company.
All of its elements were coded and their position in the structure recorded so that the gate could be correctly re-assembled later. Resin repairs and reclaimed teak, sourced in India, have been inserted to replace decayed timber.
A new copper dome and the introduction of a lead roof now provide protection against rain and the gate is reinstalled with its legs raised from the ground on ‘pins’. Hand-carved replacements were made for some damaged finials and carved panel sections.
All of this work has been completed without compromising the outward appearance of the gate |
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The Jaipur Gate returned to the garden of Hove Museum & Art Gallery (but away from the trees) in the spring of 2006.
