Seated Five Wisdom Buddhas, National museum in Higashiyama district, Kyoto, Japan.
Kyoto National Museum is a national museum in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, Japan, with a main building of red brick designed in French Renaissance style. The collection covers Japanese art and cultural objects from several periods, displayed across two structures on the grounds.
The museum opened in May 1897 as the Imperial Museum of Kyoto, an institution launched in 1889 alongside the imperial museums of Tokyo and Nara. Its main building, designed by court architect Katayama Tōkuma, was begun in June 1892 and finished in October 1895; planned as three storeys, it was reduced to one after brick buildings collapsed in the 1891 Nōbi earthquake. Renamed the Imperial Household Museum of Kyoto in 1900 and the Imperial Gift Museum of Kyoto in 1924, it became the Kyoto National Museum in 1952.
Since opening, the institution has gathered works from over a thousand years of Japanese art history, especially sculptures, paintings, ceramics, and textiles from Kyoto and the surrounding region. Visitors today see objects once kept in Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, many of which were shown only on special occasions in their original settings.
The Meiji Koto-kan, the 1895 brick hall by Katayama Tokuma, is used for special exhibitions, while the 2013 Heisei Chishin-kan by Yoshio Taniguchi holds the regular displays. The grounds are entered through the main gate off Higashiyama Shichijo; the museum is a short walk from Shichijo Station on the Keihan line and served by city buses stopping at the Museum and Sanjusangendo-mae stop. The Rodin bronze The Thinker stands on the axis between the gate and the old hall.
Many of the objects on display remain property of the temples and shrines that lend them for long periods, so the museum acts as a bridge between religious communities and visitors. This arrangement allows fragile or sacred works to be shown under controlled conditions without permanently removing them from their spiritual context.
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