TOKYO.- The pictorial treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston are being shown in Tokyo, in a major exhibition that explores five centuries of European art made by masters such as Rembrandt, Velazquez, El Greco, Picasso and Van Gogh.

The exhibition takes place at the Mori Art Center in Japan's capital, where the visitor is greeted at the entrance by two pictures, Velasquez’ "Luis de Gongora y Argote (1622), and " Victorine Meurent "(1862) by Edouard Manet, as evidence of the influence that the first painter had on the second.

The tour includes 80 works painted by 47 European masters and are articulated through various themes addressing portraits to religious paintings, landscapes and still lifes.

The first section, the portrait, has a dozen masterpieces ranging from Rembrandt's baroque features to the impressionism of Manet or Picasso's Cubism with his "Portrait of a Woman" (1910).

The room devoted to religious painting of the seventeenth century houses jewels such as "Saint Dominic in Prayer" (1605) by El Greco, acquired by Edgar Degas in 1896, or "Christ after the flagellation" painted by Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo around 1665.

Impressionism, a movement popular in Japan, has a special space in this exhibition, with a section dedicated only to the landscapes of Claude Monet in ten paintings featuring his favorite themes, including "The Water Lily Pond" (1990) and "Rouen Cathedral Facade and Tour d'Albane (1894).

One of the jewels of the initial stage of Impressionism has also made its way to Tokyo, "At the Races in the Countryside" by Edgar Degas, the work which was shown in the first exhibition of the Impressionists, in 1874, along with other masters such as Monet and Paul Cézanne.

The hanging of the works plays with the relationship between the different authors: thus the work of Vincent van Gogh “Houses at Auvers "(1890) appears next to" The Pond " by Cézanne, who lived in Auvers between 1872 and 1874, and the influence Cézanne had on Renoir can be seen a few feet away in the painting "Rocky Crags at L'Estaque" (1882).

The works are a selection of about 1,600 that make up the collection of European paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which normally are not exhibited outside the galleries of the museum. The exhibition runs through June 20 in Tokyo and from July 6 to August 29 at the Museum of the City of Kyoto.