The great Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel (1525/30-1569) is one of the best-loved painters in Japan. While many of his works illustrate proverbs or portray playing children and ordinary people carousing or enjoying sports, they are at the same time subtle allegories satirizing human weakness and folly. In Bruegel’s world we can see the roots of the culture European common people and this affords the Japanese viewers a glimpse into the heart of a Europe with which they may be less familiar, but which on acquaintance does not perhaps seem all that strange. Thanks to the unstinted cooperation of the Royal Library of Belgium, this exhibition brings together some 150 engravings by Bruegel and his contemporaries, for a new look at and a new appraisal of Bruegel and his world.

Admission: Adult ¥1,400 College/ HS ¥1,000 JHS/ Child ¥700
¥200 discount per person for advance tickets or group purchases of 20 or more.
Information: 03-3477-9413

	Emile Claus. Haymaker, 1896. Oil on Canvas. Private collection.

Around the middle of the 19th century, painters all over Europe increasingly left the noise and clamor of the big cities and settled in artists’ colonies in the countryside, where they could put their visions of the landscape and the farmers’ lives straight onto the canvas outside. In Belgium, artists from flemish cities flocked to the rural village of Sint-Martens-Latem near Ghent. This phenomenon would give rise to an independent art school of exceptionally high quality. As in similar colonies elsewhere, the artists in this village were not primarily interested in expressing some hard-and-fast sort of ideology, but rather in creating close ties among themselves and in communicating closely with the lush nature and the farmers of the area, so they might express the peaceful soul of this area through their paintings. Their works present the countryside and people of Flanders from a unique vantage point, but more than that, they are filled with a sense of time that seems to flow more leisurely than ours.
It is especially this latter quality that captures the viewer’s heart and fills it with peace.

Admission: Adult ¥1,400 College/ HS ¥1,000 JHS/ Child ¥700
¥200 discount per person for advance tickets or group purchases of 20 or more.
Information: 03-3477-9413