iTokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumUeno Park
Edo in Focus: Japanese Treasures from the British Museum
This exhibition has ended.
100th-anniversary loan show of Edo-period ukiyo-e paintings and prints by Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai and Hiroshige from the British Museum's Japanese collection.
Museum websiteMore in Tokyo
Four sets of Kano school sliding-door paintings, split for about 150 years between a family collection in Aomori, the British Museum and the Seattle Art Museum, hang together here for the first time since. They anchor a loan of around 200 works, timed to the museum's 100th anniversary.
Around them: folding screens, hanging scrolls and handscrolls, then more than 100 prints by eight masters including Hokusai, Utamaro, Sharaku and Hiroshige, and a section on how Japanese art travelled to England and North America. Four sliding doors took 150 years to get back together. Your group chat has been trying to fix a nomikai date since April.
Tickets are ¥2,300 at the door and ¥2,100 in advance. Fridays run until 20:00, last entry 19:30. It closes on 18 October and is shut on Mondays, except 12 October, and on 13 October. It then moves to Osaka on 31 October.
Editor's pick
Edo-period paintings and prints by Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai and Hiroshige, lent by the British Museum for the museum's 100th anniversary. A homecoming, with London's name on the label.
Look for
The reunited sliding-door paintings
Four Kano school compositions side by side, among them Autumn and Winter Flowers and Birds from London and Four Chinese Literati Playing the Qin and Go from Seattle.
Copy of the Horyu-ji Kondo Wall Painting No. 9
A restored copy of the temple wall painting, which one visitor report calls a centerpiece of the show.
The ukiyo-e prints
More than 100 sheets by eight masters, with Hokusai, Utamaro, Sharaku and Hiroshige among them.
The collectors' section
A closing section follows how Japanese works reached England and North America, naming the surgeon and early collector William Anderson.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- First-Timers
- Out-Of-Town Guests
Skip if
You want photos: one visitor report says only the sliding-door paintings could be photographed.
With kids
Free for under-18s and high school students. Tokyo-resident parents with a child under 18 pay half price on the third Saturday and the Sunday after, with ID.
Also at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
On now nearby
Picturing the Theater: From Delacroix and Daumier to Toulouse-Lautrec and Klinger
National Museum of Western Art
"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
National Museum of Western Art
Turner: Painting the Sublime, in Dialogue with Contemporary Art
National Museum of Western Art
Nearby
Image credits
4
- Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumJoe Mabel, CC BY-SA 2.0
- National Museum of Western ArtJoyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Nature and ScienceDaderot, CC0
- Tokyo National MuseumWiiii, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0