The museum is home to a significant collection of more than 36,000 artefacts including a fine assortment of Pictish carved stones, local archaeology, a Spey coracle (understood to be one of only two original coracles remaining in Britain), an internationally recognised collection of fish and reptile fossils from Moray, natural history and art, including watercolours and a small collection of locally relevant oil paintings. Elgin Museum is particularly proud of a bronze Epstein bust of the first Labour Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, and watercolour paintings by John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. The main gallery interprets life in Moray during the last thousand years and the upstairs Mezzanine Gallery provides regional artists with the opportunity to display and sell their work. One of the stimuli to the building of Elgin Museum and its expansion was the accumulation of ethnographic objects, fine ceramics, textiles, sculptures and metalwork brought home by Moray people from their foreign travels in the Orient, South America, Himalayas and the South Seas. The Museum continues to collect artefacts, paintings and documents relating to Moray or Moray people, an interest reflected in its small collection of oil paintings.