The Kyoto National Museum opened in 1897 in a red-brick French-Renaissance pavilion designed by Tokuma Katayama — the same architect who built the Akasaka Detached Palace in Tokyo — and was joined in 2014 by a sleek glass-and-steel extension by Yoshio Taniguchi. The combined museum houses the foremost public collection of pre-modern Japanese art outside Tokyo, with particular strength in Buddhist sculpture and painting drawn from temples in and around Kyoto.
The permanent collection runs from prehistoric pottery to the late Edo period, with a strong concentration of National Treasure and Important Cultural Property designations: gilt-bronze Heian Buddhist images, hanging-scroll paintings by the Kanō and Tosa schools, ceramics, lacquerware, and a celebrated room of woodblock prints. Major temporary exhibitions twice a year often draw from temple holdings rarely shown elsewhere. Allow at least two hours; combine with Sanjūsangen-dō across the street.