Museum and gallery, Mymensingh
Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin Sangrahashalaশিল্পাচার্য জয়নুল আবেদিন সংগ্রহশালা
- Time needed
- About an hour.
- best months
- Nov–Feb
The museum of Bangladesh's great painter, in a riverside park on the Brahmaputra where he learned to draw.
Plan your visit
- Best time
- Late afternoon, then stay for sunset on the river.
At a glance
- Opened
- 15 April 1975
- Run by
- Bangladesh National Museum (branch)
- Grounds
- 3.2 acres on the Old Brahmaputra
About
Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) grew up in Mymensingh and drew pictures sitting by the Brahmaputra. While still at the local Mrityunjay School he won a prize in a Bombay Chronicle art competition, and his teachers sent him to the Calcutta art school in 1933. He became the pioneer of modern art in the country; his drawings of the Bengal famine of 1943 are its best-known images.
The gallery opened in his home town on 15 April 1975, the year before he died, in an old riverside house, with about seventy of his works. Seventeen were stolen in 1982 and only ten came back. Since 1999 it has been a branch of the Bangladesh National Museum, which renovated the 3.2-acre grounds and finished in 2004.
The museum sits in the Shaheb Quarter park on the Old Brahmaputra, with an art school, an artists' cottage and an open-air stage beside it. Every December it marks his anniversary with talks and a painting competition.
Getting there: On the riverbank at the north edge of the town centre, in the Shaheb Quarter park.
Things to do
- See his drawings and paintings, then walk the riverbank where he sketched as a boy.
- Come in December for the anniversary programme.
Good to know
- Tickets are sold at the gate.
