Japan-Italy: The first major retrospective of Antonio Fontanesi presented in Tokyo.

One hundred and fifty years after his arrival in Japan, Antonio Fontanesi is the protagonist of the first major retrospective dedicated to the painter from Reggio Emilia in the Land of the Rising Sun. The exhibition Antonio Fontanesi: Transcending Landscape – A European Artist at the Opening of Japan, organized by GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino and the Fondazione Torino Musei, was presented with a press conference at the Italian Embassy in Tokyo. The traveling exhibition will open on July 18, 2026, at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, and will then travel to the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo (October 17, 2026 – January 24, 2027) and the Nagoya City Museum of Art (February 6 – April 4, 2027). The initiative, supported by the Italian Embassy, is organized with the special collaboration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Italian Cultural Institutes in Tokyo and Osaka, and the Turin Chamber of Commerce.

“The Fontanesi exhibition will allow an even wider Japanese public to get to know the works of a great Italian Master,” declared the Italian Ambassador in Tokyo, Mario Vattani, remembering that he was, together with Vincenzo Ragusa and Giovanni Cappelletti, among the Italian artists called by Emperor Meiji to teach at the Boku Bijuttsu Gakko, the first official art academy in Japan, in 1876.

Painter, printmaker, and teacher, Fontanesi (Reggio Emilia, 1818 – Turin, 1882) is one of the most singular figures of 19th-century Italy: he volunteered in Garibaldi’s wars of independence, exhibited at the Paris Salon alongside Millet and Corot, and spent time in London absorbing the lessons of Turner and Constable. In 1876, the artist arrived in Tokyo at the behest of the Meiji government as an oyatoi gaikokujin (foreign expert) to introduce Western painting techniques. A teacher at the Kobu Bijutsu Gakkō, the art school founded as part of the country’s great modernization program, in just two years Fontanesi trained a generation of artists who would shape the history of modern Japanese art. The painter’s stay in Japan was interrupted by health problems, but his artistic influence was profound and lasting: among his students were Asai Chū and Koyama Shōtarō, considered among the founders of Western painting (Yōga) in Japan.

The retrospective brings together approximately two hundred works, including oil paintings and engravings, from both Italian institutions and Japanese museums, in a chronological and thematic presentation divided into eight sections. From his early landscapes developed in Geneva to his studies of light and atmosphere inspired by Corot, from the urban views of London and Turin to his works on peasant labor, up to the masterpieces of his Japanese period and the late canvases in which he revisits his entire experience: a broad and coherent overview of Fontanesi’s output, presented in its entirety to a Japanese public for the first time. Alongside the master’s works, the exhibition features works by his Japanese students and the 20th-century Italian artists—from Segantini to Carlo Carrà—who inherited his legacy.