This exhibition at Tokyo’s Yamatane Museum of Art focuses on animal paintings by Seiho Takeuchi and other modern and contemporary nihonga (Japanese-style painting) artists. The highlight is Takeuchi’s signature work ‘Tabby Cat’, an Important Cultural Property of Japan produced in 1924. Known as one of the leading modern artists of his time, the Kyoto-born Takeuchi based his masterpiece on a feline he once saw at a greengrocer in Numazu, Shizuoka prefecture, which reminded him of a cat painted by Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty in China.
Besides 17 of Takeuchi’s works, you can also look forward to other animal paintings by Kansetsu Hashimoto, Shoko Uemura and Kokei Kobayashi. Don’t miss the museum’s additional display of ‘Prototype for Illustrated Scrolls of the Arrival of Christianity’ by Tadashi Moriya, one of the nation’s leading historical painters during the Showa (1926-1989) and Heisei (1989-2019) eras. This work is being shown in Japan for the first time, and will after the exhibition be donated to the Vatican in order to commemorate Pope Francis’s visit to Japan in November 2019.
Note: due to Covid-19, tickets have to be purchased in advance.