The story
The Yamagata Museum of Art opened in 1964 in the snowy Tohoku region of northern Japan, in a prefecture better known for cherries and hot springs than for French painting. Its reputation rests largely on a collection lent by an unlikely patron, the plasterboard maker Yoshino Gypsum.
In 1991 the company entrusted its holdings to the museum, more than 80 French paintings built around Impressionism, with Millet and the Barbizon landscape painters, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, and later Chagall and the artists of the École de Paris. Around this sits the museum's own collection of Japanese and Chinese art, so a visitor can move from a Millet peasant field to an East Asian scroll in the same building, deep in the Japanese north.
