Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection

In 1975, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired more than four hundred works of Japanese art from collector Harry G. C. Packard (1914–1991), by gift and purchase. The acquisition instantly transformed the Museum into an institution boasting one of the finest collections of its kind in the West, with encyclopedic holdings from the Neolithic period through the nineteenth century.

This exhibition celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of the acquisition of the Packard Collection, showcasing its particular strengths in archaeological artifacts, Buddhist iconographic scrolls, ceramics, screen paintings of the Momoyama and Edo periods (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries), and sculptures of the Heian and Kamakura periods (ninth through fourteenth centuries). A highlight of the exhibition is a pairing of masterpieces by a Kano school master and his son: Old Plum, a set of sliding-door panels by Kano Sansetsu (1589–1651) in the Packard Collection; and One Hundred Boys, a pair of six-fold screens by Kano Einō (1631–1697), which was just acquired in 2009.