Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, TokyoMarunouchi
Fontanesi: Italian Light, Landscapes of the Heart
First major retrospective in Japan in 50 years of Italian landscape painter Antonio Fontanesi (1818-1882), who taught early Japanese Western-style painters in Tokyo.
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In 1880 Antonio Fontanesi sent Clouds, a canvas two metres tall and three wide, to Turin's national art exhibition, confident in it, and the critics turned on it. You get to judge for yourself: it's here, and the small gallery pairs it with April (1873), a cloud passing the sun as light breaks over a plain.
Japan knows Fontanesi as the Italian the Meiji government hired in 1876 to teach oil painting, whose students included Asai Chū and Koyama Shōtarō. About 200 works, mostly lent by Turin's GAM, follow him through Geneva, Paris, London and Florence, then his two Tokyo years and the Italians he influenced. In the small gallery, Asai's brown-toned landscapes, nicknamed yani-ha (the resin school), hang beside Kuroda Seiki's brighter outdoor light.
Adults pay 2,300 yen, or 1,600 after 17:00 on second Wednesdays. It's open until 20:00 then, on non-holiday Fridays and the final week's weekdays, and some works rotate. Wear two of the Italian flag's three colours and the ticket desk takes 100 yen off.
Look for
Clouds (1880)
Look for the thickly built-up paint across this two-by-three-metre sky, the canvas Fontanesi reworked for years and Turin's critics attacked when he showed it in 1880.
April (1873)
Look for the instant a cloud covers the sun and light spreads across the plain in rainbow tints.
Morning (1855-58)
The show's poster image, in the second chapter: trees and water dissolving in pale light, painted for the atmosphere rather than the detail.
The marsh sunsets
A series following how a marsh landscape changes as the sun goes down, including one lent by the Mie Prefectural Art Museum.
Asai Chū's Tokugawa mausoleum entrance (c.1878)
An oil on paper of a temple entrance by Fontanesi's Tokyo student, painted while he was teaching and now owned by Turin's GAM.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Nerding Out
- Rainy Days
With kids
Junior-high students and younger get in free; high-school students pay 1,000 yen.
Also at Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo
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Image credits
7
- Suikoden: The Water Margin, Outlaws of the MarshCourtesy of Tokyo Station Gallery
- Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection x Fujii Hikaru "WHOSE LIGHT?"Courtesy of Artizon Museum
- The Strangers' Gaze: Japanese Artists in EuropeCourtesy of Artizon Museum
- Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, TokyoDaderot, CC0
- Tokyo Station GalleryDaderot / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
- Artizon Museumpcs34560 from jawp / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- National Museum of Modern Art, TokyoKakidai, CC BY-SA 4.0