National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

The National Gallery of Modern Art's claim on this archive is depth in one specific area: modern Indian painting from roughly 1850 to the Progressive Artists' Group and after, anchored by the largest single holding of Amrita Sher-Gil's work anywhere and a Jamini Roy collection the museum itself says is deep enough in drawings and sketches to matter to serious study of the artist. Its sculpture, photography and print-making departments are real but explicitly still being built out, in the museum's own words, rather than comparably exhaustive.

The building the National Gallery of Modern Art occupies was not built to hold paintings. Jaipur House was commissioned in 1936 by Maharaja Man Singh II of Jaipur as his residence within Lutyens' New Delhi, and completed in 1938 to a design by the architect Arthur Blomfield and his brother Francis. It sits at the end of Rajpath facing India Gate, one of a ring of princely-state houses built around Edwin Lutyens' central hexagon. The plan is a butterfly: two symmetrical wings radiate from a central domed pavilion, the whole faced in alternating bands of red and buff Dholpur sandstone, with Rajput-style columns framing the arched openings and Mughal motifs worked into the stonework beneath a saucer-shaped dome.

After independence the government turned the palace to a different purpose. The National Gallery of Modern Art was formally inaugurated inside it on 29 March 1954 by Vice-President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Humayun Kabir present. The idea itself was older than the building's conversion: the Delhi-based All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society had proposed a national art gallery as early as 1938, and a 1949 conference of artists and critics in Calcutta, convened by the new government, had passed a resolution backing it. The gallery's opening exhibition, fittingly for a palace turned public building, was not painting but sculpture: 65 works by 31 Indian sculptors, shown across five rooms, with D. P. Roy Chowdhury, Ramkinkar Baij, Sankho Chaudhuri and Dhanraj Bhagat among the artists.

The museum's first director was Hermann Goetz, a German art historian who had previously run the Baroda Museum, and who set up the gallery's restoration service, its reference library and its documentation centre in his two years in the post. But the collection he inherited and built was shaped less by institutional planning than by a single, unusually large acquisition. Amrita Sher-Gil had died in 1941, and in the years around the gallery's founding the government acquired 161 of her paintings - more than half of the entire early collection - through her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil: thirty-three works purchased outright, another thirty-three donated on the condition that the museum also acquire paintings by her husband. Nehru personally committed fifty thousand rupees from National Museum funds to the purchase. In 1953 the gallery separately bought sixty-six paintings, sketches and drawings by Abanindranath Tagore from his sister Pratima Tagore for thirty thousand rupees, along with ten works by Abdur Rahman Chughtai and eight each by Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose. The result was a founding collection in which two names, Sher-Gil and Tagore, accounted for more than half of everything the new gallery owned - an imbalance the museum has spent the seven decades since correcting by acquisition, exhibition and, since 2009, by simply having somewhere to put more of what it already held in storage.

The museum organises its account of Indian art from roughly 1750 to the present around ten names it treats as foundational: Raja Ravi Varma, Rabindranath Tagore, his nephews Gaganendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij, Sailoz Mookherjea and Amrita Sher-Gil. Ahead of them, chronologically, sit galleries of Mughal and Rajput court miniature painting - the museum's own account traces the form back to around 750 AD - and the Company Period work produced in provincial ateliers in Calcutta, Delhi, Patna, Tanjore and Mysore for British patrons, alongside canvases by the European travelling painters, Thomas Daniell and William Hodges among them, who painted India for audiences at home.

The Bengal School that Abanindranath Tagore led in the early twentieth century, with the Englishman E. B. Havell and Sister Nivedita among its supporters, is shown as a deliberate rejection of the academic realism the colonial art schools taught: its painters worked in wash and tempera rather than oil, borrowing a wash technique from Japanese painters and turning to Kalighat pat painting and folk sources for a visual language that owed nothing to Europe. Jamini Roy took that turn furthest, abandoning an academic training in Impressionism and Pointillism for the flat, calligraphic figures - peasants, artisans, village women, animals rendered in a few strokes - that the gallery holds in unusual depth: its own collection notes call the number of Roy drawings and sketches it holds important enough that no serious study of his work can skip it.

Independence-era and later collecting brought in the Progressive Artists' Group that formed in Bombay in 1947 - F. N. Souza, M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade and the sculptor S. Bakre - who the museum says made 'engagement with pure form' their creed, plus the associated Calcutta Group and later painters such as Tyeb Mehta, V. S. Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Krishen Khanna, Anjolie Ela Menon and Arpita Singh. A photography collection built around the Lala Deen Dayal archive of princely-era portraiture - which the museum calls one of its greatest assets - extends through Raghu Rai, Dayanita Singh, Vivan Sundaram and Nemai Ghosh, though the museum describes this department as still being actively built rather than complete.

For its first half-century the gallery showed only a fraction of what it owned; the rest sat in storage inside Jaipur House itself. A major expansion completed in 2009 added three new blocks behind the original palace, built to echo its sandstone banding and colonnaded screens, and multiplied the exhibition space roughly sixfold to around 12,000 square metres across four levels - office space, a cafeteria, a museum shop, an auditorium, a preview theatre, a conservation laboratory and an academic library among the additions. The expansion also converted around fifty rooms previously used for storage into gallery space. The museum's collection today runs to more than 17,000 objects - some 9,000 paintings, over 2,000 drawings, close to 1,500 prints and some 1,400 sketches, by its own count - by more than 2,000 artists, with the oldest works dating to 1857. On the strength of that expanded footprint the institution describes its Delhi site as one of the largest museums of modern art anywhere, a claim resting on floor area rather than on the density or fame of any single gallery's holdings.

The gallery has been led by a long line of art historians and artists rather than career administrators - Mukul Dey, who as a young artist drew the 1930 chalk portrait of Nandalal Bose the museum still holds, himself directed the institution from 1956 to 1958, followed by the sculptor Pradosh Dasgupta, the archaeologist B. B. Lal, and a further decade under Laxmi Prasad Sihare from 1971. Its later branches in Mumbai and Bengaluru extended the same collecting mandate under regional emphases on curatorial practice and contemporary work rather than duplicating the Delhi galleries. Its published history is not free of the ordinary hazards of lending abroad: a 1989 press report the museum's own historical record cites described works from the collection returning from international festival loans in damaged condition, a reminder that a national collection whose paintings travel is a collection with something at stake every time a crate is opened at the other end.

The gallery keeps longer hours at the weekend than during the week - Tuesday to Friday from ten in the morning to six in the evening, Saturday and Sunday from eleven to eight - and is closed on Mondays and national holidays. Entry costs twenty rupees for Indian nationals and five hundred for foreign visitors, with free entry for students and children under eighteen, defence personnel in uniform, differently abled visitors, underprivileged children and ICOM members, all on production of valid identification. The nearest metro stop is Central Secretariat, on the Yellow and Violet lines, about half a kilometre's walk from the gate. Visitors most often cite the Sher-Gil and Tagore holdings and the calm of the sculpture-garden lawns as the reason to come, and most often name the state of the building's upkeep, inconsistent staff at the ticket counter and sparse labelling of individual works as what they wish were better - a gap, more than a contradiction, between a collection this large and the everyday experience of walking through it.

Visitors consistently single out the collection of modern Indian painting - Tagore, Sher-Gil, Raja Ravi Varma - and the calm of the Jaipur House grounds as the draw, while also consistently naming the building's upkeep and the way works are labelled as the gap between the collection and the experience of seeing it.