Image: Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo
Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo will present ‘Antonio Fontanesi: Transcending Landscape — A European Artist at the Opening of Japan’ from 17 October 2026 to 24 January 2027. The museum notes that some works will be rotated during the run.
Fontanesi (1818–1882) was invited to Japan in 1876, at the age of 58, to teach painting at the Technical Fine Arts School (Kobu Bijutsu Gakkō). His students there included Asai Chū and Koyama Shōtarō, among the first Japanese painters to work in Western styles. He had earlier spent periods in Switzerland, France and Britain, absorbing the example of the Barbizon School and of Turner, and developed a poetic landscape manner of his own. In 1869 he was appointed professor of landscape painting at the academy of fine arts in Turin, where he continued to work into his final years.
The exhibition is mounted with the cooperation of the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) in Turin and the Fondazione Torino Musei, both of which are also co-organisers alongside the museum. It surveys Fontanesi’s output from the beginning of his career to its end, and examines his influence and legacy in the work of his Japanese pupils and of Italian artists of his own and the following generation. The museum puts the total at some 200 works.
The show is supported by the Embassy of Italy, with special cooperation from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation’s directorate general for growth and internationalisation and from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Tokyo. The Turin Chamber of Commerce is a partner; DNP Dai Nippon Printing and CRIF Japan are sponsors; TOKYO MX is a cooperating broadcaster.
Opening hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., extended to 8 p.m. on Fridays other than public holidays, on the second Wednesday of the month and on weekdays in the closing week, with last admission half an hour before closing. The museum shuts on Mondays — except public holidays, the Talk Free Days of 26 October, 30 November and 28 December, and 18 January — and on 31 December and 1 January. Advance tickets are available through the museum’s official ticketing page.
Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum stands in Marunouchi, a short walk from Tokyo Station, and opened in 2010 in a faithful reconstruction of the 1894 Mitsubishi Ichigokan office building designed by Josiah Conder. Operated by Mitsubishi Estate, it holds three special exhibitions a year, concentrating on Western art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
