Fukuoka Art Museum

This guide to the Fukuoka Art Museum starts with an odd fact: the museum began buying art in 1974, five years before its building even opened. It follows what the curators chose as their very first purchase, a nearly forgotten French academic painter named Raphael Collin, and traces the debt behind that choice back to a young painter from Kagoshima, Kuroda Seiki, who studied in Collin's Paris studio. Kuroda came home remembered as the doyen of Western-style painting in Japan, and his teacher's Paris studio is where the museum's own story starts.