Highlights of Japanese Art

These galleries feature recent acquisitions in dialogue with treasures from the museum’s world-renowned collection of Japanese art. The impressive, large-scale Welcoming Descent of Amida with Twenty-Five Bodhisattvas from the mid-1300s is displayed alongside the important early 1300s handscroll The Illustrated Miraculous Origins of the Yūzū Nenbutsu School, which depicts Buddhists interacting with paintings of Amida in descent.

A diminutive sculpture from the 1100s of Gozu Tennō, the ox-headed plague deity, is on view with a large Buddhist sketch and an image of Zaō Gongen, the deity of Mount Kinpu, both also from the same period. Together, these works of art show how Buddhist iconography informed how other gods were represented.

Five small-scale Nabeshima dishes showcase the versatility of ceramists in northern Kyushu during the 1600s and early 1700s, while a complex pair of early 1600s screens depicts the arrival of European traders to the port city of Nagasaki.