Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art

Founded in 1986, the 9.240 m² (99,458⁵ ft²) museum is located in the vicinity of the University of Shizuoka's (静岡県立大学) Kusanagi campus, on a verdant hill on the northern side of the picturesque Nihondaira Plateau in the southern part of the city.

A promenade in the midst of a Sculpture Garden creates a pleasurable journey for visitors to the wooded site and leads right up to the main museum entrance. Twelve sculptures grace this main alleyway. Monumental work by American artists George Rickey, James Rosati and Tony Smith is complemented by work from Japanese sculptors such as Makio Yamaguchi (山口牧生), Tadayoshi Sato (佐藤忠良), Kiyosumi Onishi (大西清澄), Kubei Shimizu (清水九兵衛), Takashi Sugimura (杉村孝), Goro Kakei (掛井五郎), Hisao Suzuki (鈴木久雄), Yoshitatsu Yanagihara (柳原義達) and Yasutake Funakoshi (舟越保武).^[2]

The Main Building houses a.o. a Gallery of Prefecture Residents with work from local Japanese artists, mostly of lesser interest to an international public.

The bulk of the collection on show is constituted mostly of Japanese and some Western works of art, primarily focused on landscape painting.^[3],[4] The museum also has a fine collection of Japanese drawings and prints, as well as a number of prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Marco Ricci, etc., and watercolours by Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Robert Cozens.

XVII^th-C. and XVIII^th-C landscape paintings by Hubert Robert, Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld constitute the earliest examples of the French School.

French early XIX^th-C painting is represented by Gustave Courbet, Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau, Achille-Etna Michallon, and Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy. Paintings by French Impressionists Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, by Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Paul Signac and Paul Gauguin, and by fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck complement the late XIX^th-C collection.

The English masters John Constable and Samuel Palmer typify the early XIX^th-C school of British landscape painting.

The Dutch school shows a number of XVII^th-C works by masters such as Jakob van Ruysdael, Rembrandt Van Rijn, Aert van der Neer, Jan van Goyen and Adriaen van Ostade.

(Work in Progress) ^{[to be expanded]}

The 400-year history of the Kanō school is one of the main focuses of the museum.

Many depictions of Mount Fuji and the Tōkaidō landscape by various Japanese painters can be viewed in the collection as is work by painters associated with the Tokugawa shogunate.

Most notable Japanese paintings are works by Taikan Yokoyama (横山 大観), a twentieth century painter, and Jakuchū Itō (伊藤 若冲), an eighteenth century (mid-Edo-period) master, who made a famous set of painted folding screens, called the Juka chōjū-zu byōbu (樹花鳥獣図屏風, Birds and Animals in the Flower Garden), using a rare technique he invented, masume gaki (枡目描き).^[5]

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  Juka Choju-zu Byobu (樹花鳥獣図屏風, Birds and Animals in the Flower Garden (left panel))
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  Juka Choju-zu Byobu (樹花鳥獣図屏風, Birds and Animals in the Flower Garden (right panel))

The museum has a number of sculptural works by 1960s artists from a group called GEN-SHOKU, i.e. Phantom Touch (幻触, Shizuoka Kenritsu Bijutsukan), a local avant-garde city-based movement of the XXth century: Issei Koike (小池一誠), Shoji Iida (飯田昭二), Yoshinori Suzuki (鈴木慶則), Morichi Maeda (前田守一) and Katsuji Niwa (丹羽勝次). Some of these artists became involved with later members of the Mono-ha movement.^[6],[7]

The main attraction of this museum is its lofty 3.025 m² (32,560 ft²) domed Rodin Wing (designed by the Shizuoka office of Nissoken Architects and Engineers, Tokyo) which opened in March 1994^[8],[9] and offers a splendid home to a collection of thirty-two sculptures by the renowned French artist Auguste Rodin, including certified versions of The Thinker, The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, ... and some Monuments to great artists, such as James McNeill Whistler, Claude Lorrain, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Charles Baudelaire or Honoré de Balzac.

In the Bridge Gallery, connecting the Main Building to the Rodin Wing, the spectator can experience a total of 51 sculptures, from periods before and after Rodin, by renowned sculptors such as: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Antoine-Louis Barye, Jules Dalou, Emmanuel Frémiet, Medardo Rosso, Constantin Brancusi, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, Jacques Lipchitz, Aristide Maillol, Antoine Bourdelle, Alexander Archipenko, Alberto Giacometti, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Henry Moore, Paul Gauguin, Ernst Barlach and Camille Claudel, Rodin's muse and one-time lover.^[10]

(Work in Progress) ^{[to be expanded]}