The collections of the museum range from the important pieces of well-known Japanese painters of the early Meiji period to the present time, the works of European Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and ?cole de Paris, and the works of Post-war American art, including sculptures. Among all the inventories of around 2000, it is our palettes collection that gained the high reputations of specialists and art lovers.
The pallets collection started to take shape from 1967, the 40th Anniversary of the galerie nichido, in response to the request from Jin HASEGAWA (the founder of the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art and the galerie nichido) to his close painters deepening their friendship over the years, for he came to know that a French painter Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955) painted a picture on his regularly used pallet, as a gift to a picture dealer Petrides. Since then the collection kept on growing through the donations of pallets from the painters themselves and from the families of deceased painters. It eventually became a peerless collection in the world.
Most of the pallets contains the favorite motifs of the painters themselves, and they are small in size but cheerful pieces of our collection, popular among the viewers. The long-used pallets inevitably tell us the passions towards the works of painters, and the colorfully scattered traces of paints and brushes indicate the painter's characteristics as well as the secrets of their works.
The pallets never make the viewers bored, as various individualities are condensed onto them; such as those of Takeshi HAYASHI, a painter full of soul devoting his life to painting, Rei KAMOI, a masochistic painter with a sign of ruin, Seiji TOGO, drawing the images of sweet women flitting on his pallet, and Setsuko MGISHI, expressing the warmth of women.
The number of pallets reaches around 320, including those of the great modern Japanese painters of the past, as Ryuzaburo UMEHARA and Soutaro YASUI, the extremely active painters of present-day, and the foreign masters of painting as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.
Rei KAMOI (1928-1985)
Born in Ishikawa Prefecture. Studied under Saburo MIYAMOTO at the Kanazawa College of Art, and graduated the department of European painting at the same college. Then he became a member of the Nikikai, an Artist's Association. He went over to France, the South American countries, and Spain. He owned his atelier at Kobe City, after returning from abroad. As a "painter of portrait," he severely continued to observe and to search for the actual conditions of life, always staring life and death by calmly reflecting himself on the sublime aspects of life. He passed away in Kobe. His elder sister is Yoko KAMOI, a underwear designer.
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