Summer is the season when many people enjoy traveling, to the seashore, to the mountains, escaping the heat or exploring alien lands. For this peripatetic time of year, the Yamatane Museum of Art has chosen travel as its theme in planning the perfect summer vacation exhibition. Through it, visitors can savor the experience of traveling, in the museum.

Travel became widespread in Japan in the Edo period, when a system of highways and post stations with lodgings for travelers was put in place. Interest in touring the country soared in the latter half of the Edo period, and Jippensha Ikku's Shank's Mare, a humorous novel about traveling the Tōkaidō Road, became a bestseller. That was the context in which Utagawa Hiroshige created his ukiyoe landscape series. Of those series, his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, which depicts the journey from Edo to Kyoto in lavish detail, took the world by storm, inspiring many similar sets of prints. (Published by Hōeidō, the series consists of 55 prints and the front cover; half will be shown in the first part of the exhibition and the other half in the second part.)

In the Meiji period, modernization brought the development of railways, shipping routes, and other means of transportation, making travel even more accessible to the people of Japan. Artists joined their fellow citizens in setting out on journeys in search of new techniques and subject matter or on voyages of self-discovery. Their experiences in traveling inspired a large body of work.

"Traveling at the Museum!" defines an exhibition that presents the wonders of lands near and far through the eyes of Japanese artists. Depictions of travelers and landscapes throughout Japan, including Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, are joined by paintings of foreign lands--Yokoyama Taikan's China, Hayami Gyoshū's Egypt, Paris as presented by Saeki Yūzō and Yūki Somei, and Hirayama Ikuo's depiction of the Silk Road. We invite you to share these artists' journeys by making a short trip yourself, to the Yamatane Museum of Art, to enjoy their work with your friends and family.