Kyoto National Museum

The Kyoto National Museum  is one of the three formerly imperially-mandated art museums in Japan. The museum is located in Higashiyama Ward in Kyoto. The collections of the Kyoto National Museum focus on pre-modern Japanese and Asian art. The Museum is currently undergoing renovation and will reopen in 2013.

The Kyoto National Museum, then the Imperial Museum of Kyoto, was proposed, along with the Imperial Museum of Tokyo (Tokyo National Museum) and the Imperial Museum of Nara (Nara National Museum), in 1889, and construction on the museum finished in October, 1895. The museum was opened in 1897. The museum went through a series of name changes, in 1900 changing its name to the Imperial Household Museum of Kyoto, and once more in 1924 to the Imperial Gift Museum of Kyoto. The current name, the Kyoto National Museum, was decided upon in 1952.

The museum was originally built to house and display art treasures privately owned by temples and shrines, as well as items donated by the Imperial Household Ministry. Currently, most all of the items in the museum are more or less on permanent loan from one of those places.

The museum is divided into three parts: Fine Arts, including sculptures, paintings and works of calligraphy; Handicrafts, including pottery, fabrics, lacquerwares and metalworks; and Archaeology, including objects of archaeological and historical interest. Altogether, the museum houses over 12,000 works, of which around 6,000 are on display at the museum. The museum also boasts photographic archives containing over 200,000 photographic negatives and color transparencies. In the Fine Arts collections alone, there are more than 230 pieces that have been designated as either National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties.

The museum focuses on mainly pre-modern Japanese works (it is said to have the largest collection of Heian period artifacts) and Asian art. The museum is also well-known for its collections of rare and ancient Chinese and Japanese sutras. Other famous works include senzui byobu (landscape screen) from the 11th century, and the gakizoshi (Scroll of Hungry Ghosts) from the 12th century.