"Shōwa 100th": How Conservation and Restoration Evolved at the NMWA during the Shōwa Period — Van Gogh's Roses and Renoir's Woman with a Hat

Van Gogh saw these roses blooming in the grounds of the Saint-Rémy asylum in 1889 and painted them in the intense, undulating strokes of his last works. Here the painting is one of two named works in a display about the people who look after the collection.

The NMWA is the only one of Japan's national art museums with both a conservation studio and a conservation science lab. Using archive material, the display traces that work from the museum's opening in 1959 to 1989, the end of the Shōwa era. The other named work is Renoir's Woman with a Hat (1891), from his "pearl period", when he mixed every colour with white.

You find it in the Nineteenth Century Hall, the skylit atrium at the centre of Le Corbusier's Main Building, where the ramp to the upper galleries begins. It counts as part of the collection displays: 500 yen, free for under-18s and over-65s, and free for everyone on the second Sunday of the month.