French forest
In the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent I had my first (unexpected) meeting with Japanese modern painting. It was a painting made by the Japanese impressionist Torajiro Kojima (1881-1929). I wondered why an early 20th century Japanese painting ended up in a museum in Ghent and decided to do some research. At the age of 27 Torajiro Kojima was sent to Japan to study Western painting. At that time he was already a successfull painter in Japan. He stayed a while in Paris and left for Ghent in Belgium. He decided to stay there and became a pupil of Jean Delvin and also met Emile Claus. Both teachers advised him not to imitate Western painters but to paint from his own Japanese identity. Besides painting he also collected paintings of contempory European painters for his Japanese maecenas Ohara. He stayed four years in Europe and returned twice. Many of his works are exhibited in the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki (the first Japanese museum of modern art) just like the European paintings he collected, among which works of Courbet, Pisarro, Corot, Claus, Degas en Monet.