The Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum is deceptive in more ways than one. Not only is it a lot younger than it looks — it was built in 2009 as a recreation of a Meiji Era building — but the interior doesn't quite match the exterior. The latter looks somewhat grand and even slightly palatial, but once inside the building is in fact rather poky, with galleries that are generally quite narrow, small and winding.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it creates a cozy, even intimate atmosphere, but it does limit the kind of art that can be displayed. For example, the large canvases by Paul Rubens now showing as part of the Liechtenstein exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT) would never fit. But equally, the large open spaces of the NACT would never work with the paintings now on display at the Ichigokan.
These are by the 18th-century French painter Jean Simeon Chardin, renowned for his subtle and low-key still lifes and genre paintings of normal folk, infused with a kind of French wabi-sabi. These smallish paintings would clearly struggle to dominate large, palatial spaces or the expansive white walls of the typical large art museum. They are designed to whisper to us from shady corners and gentle alcoves, which makes the Ichigokan their ideal venue.