KARACHI, April 24: Shell Pakistan announced a donation of Rs9 million to the Mohatta Palace Museum on Wednesday.

The announcement was made at the inauguration of Shell Gallery in the Mohatta Palace Museum, currently holding a retrospective of Sadequain that was formally opened in February by Begum Amna Majeed Malik and State Bank of Pakistan Governor, Dr Ishrat Hussain.

Farooq Rehmatullah, the country chairman and managing director of Shell companies in Pakistan announced the donation to the Mohatta Palace Museum.

Appreciating the efforts that have gone into restoring the Mohatta Palace on Hatim Alvi Road, Mr Rehmatullah said Shell Pakistan is currently involved in restoring another architectural heritage — Rohtas Fort near Jhelum.

Saleemuddin Ahmed, director external affairs of Shell Pakistan, said that restoration of architectural heritage was one of the areas Shell Pakistan focussed on.

The principal attraction of the Shell Gallery is The Treasures of Time that Sadequain painted between August 1961 and October 1961.

According to the catalogue of the museum, this mural is Sadequain’s towering masterpiece of the blue and ochre period. “It celebrates the intellectual achievements of man and highlights 46 major figures divided into five main groupings,” it says.

The mural shows a prehistoric potter with the wheel, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Confucius, Herodotus, Sophocles, Archimedes, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilee, Buddha, Firdausi, Al-Ghazali, Al-Kindi, Hunain bin Ishaq, Jaber ibne Hayyan, Al-Farabi, Ibne Sina, Al-Beruni, Al-Khwarizimi, Al- Razi, Ibne Khuldun, Copernicus, William Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, Emanuel Kant, Michael Faraday, Rene Descartes, Goethe, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, Mirza Ghalib, Rabindranth Tagore, Allama Iqbal, Albert Einstein and others.

Hameed Haroon, curator of the Mohatta Palace Museum, also spoke on the occasion and highlighted the salient features of the exhibition.