Marble Palace, Kolkata, West Bengal India

Marble Palace is a palatial nineteenth-century mansion in North Kolkata. It is located at 46, Muktaram Babu Street, Kolkata 700007. It is one of the best-preserved and most elegant houses of nineteenth-century Calcutta. The mansion is famous for its marble walls and floors, from which its name derives.

The house is basically Neoclassical in style, while the plan with its open courtyards is largely traditional Bengali. Adjacent to the courtyard, there is a thakur-dalan, or place of worship for members of the family. The three-storey building has tall fluted Corinthian pillars and ornamented verandas with fretwork and sloping roofs, built in the style of a Chinese pavilion.The premises also include a garden with lawns, a rock garden, a lake and a small zoo.

he house contains large quantities of Western sculpture and Victorian furniture, paintings by European and Indian artists, and other objets d'art. Decorative objects include large chandeliers, clocks, floor to ceiling mirrors, urns, and busts of kings and queens. The house is said to contain two paintings by Rubens, The Marriage of St. Catherine and The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. There are also said to be two paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent and Venus and Cupid. Other artists said to figure in the collections include Titian, Murillo, and John Opie.

The collection of art objects is lavish, though random. Genuinely valuable pieces of art share space with a lot of kitschy art objects of little value. Geoffrey Moorhouse in his book Calcutta says it looks "as if they had been scavenged from job lots on the Portobello Road on a series of damp Saturday afternoons.