Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art

About

Opened in 1972, the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts was the sixth prefectural art museum to open in Japan and is counted among the country's early modern museums. Architect Kawasaki Kiyoshi designed both the main building and its annex, set within Sakura Park on Utsunomiya's western side. The collection runs to roughly 9,000 works of painting, prints, illustration, photography, and craft, drawing on local, national, and Western sources. Among its holdings are John Constable's "Dedham Valley" (1805–11), Claude Monet's "Coast at Saint-Adresse" (1864), and works by Takahashi Yuichi and Kawakami Sumio. More than fifty years on, the building shows cracked walls, water leaks, cramped storage, and insufficient parking, and there is discussion of relocating it beside the prefectural library on the site of the former prefectural gymnasium. Annual attendance was 47,523 in fiscal 2018, and the fiscal 2020 operating budget ran to roughly 149.9 million yen.