The story
When the Hiroshima Bank turned one hundred in 1978, it marked the anniversary by giving the city an art museum dedicated to love and peace of mind, in a place that had known the opposite. The building near the rebuilt centre of Hiroshima answers the wound of 1945 quietly, its pale domed hall shaped to echo the skeletal A-bomb Dome, with a channel of water outside for those who died searching for it.
Inside is a warm, human collection of French painting, chosen to console rather than to provoke, running from Millet and the Impressionists through Renoir and Monet to Matisse and Picasso. Its most treasured picture is one of the three versions of Daubigny's Garden that Vincent van Gogh painted in the last weeks of his life in 1890.
The scale is intimate, about ninety works on show at a time, and the galleries ring a circular courtyard, so you return to where you began.
