The story
On a green hill above Kōriyama, in Fukushima Prefecture, a curved roof of stainless steel about 100 metres long follows the rise and fall of the slope. Beneath it is the Kōriyama City Museum of Art, designed by the architect Takahiko Yanagisawa and opened in November 1992.
Inside, the surprise is British. The museum set out to collect British art systematically, an approach it describes as without precedent in Japan, and its collection takes in Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, then the late Victorian painters Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse. One of its treasures is a large pastel of 1874 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet. He called it Madonna Pietra, after the cold "stone lady" of Dante's poems, and showed her holding a crystal ball.
The other half of the collection is Japanese, from Takahashi Yuichi, a pioneer of Western-style oil painting in Meiji Japan, to Kishida Ryūsei, alongside work by artists from Kōriyama itself.
