Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring at Nakanoshima Museum of Art

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is coming to Japan for the first time in 14 years — and quite possibly the last time ever, according to the painting’s home museum. While the Mauritshuis in The Hague is closed for renovations, its most famous resident is spending five weeks in Osaka.

What to expect

12 masterworks of 17th-century Dutch painting from the Mauritshuis collection, with Girl with a Pearl Earring as the star and Vermeer’s Diana and her Nymphs alongside.

Schedule

The exhibition runs August 21 to September 27, 2026, at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (5th-floor galleries). It is open every single day of the run, Mondays included.

Hours are 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last entry at 4:30 p.m. On August 28, September 4 and 11, and then every day from September 18 to 27, the galleries stay open until 8 p.m., with last entry at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets 2026

Note: Students from junior high upwards need to bring student ID. And there is no senior discount for this exhibition — the organizers have confirmed that Osaka City residents aged 65 and over pay the full general price.

Getting a ticket is the hard part

This is a timed-entry exhibition, and the museum will not sell tickets at the door on any day of the run. You book a date and time slot ahead, or you do not get in.

Booking has been a challenge. The organizers had planned three phased, first-come-first-served sales starting July 15, but the June presales buckled under the traffic. On June 30 they issued a public apology, citing complaints about fairness and about scalping, and scrapped the phased sales entirely. In their place is a single lottery.

That lottery covers the whole run, and it is run through Ticket Pia. Applications open at noon on Tuesday, July 14 and close at noon on Tuesday, July 21. You choose your date, time slot, ticket type, and number of tickets when you apply.

A Ticket Pia account is required, so set one up before the window opens rather than during it. Results are announced date by date, and your result day and payment deadline appear on your application page. You can pay by credit card or at a convenience store.

Miss that window and you are not necessarily finished. The organizers say they intend to run further lottery rounds on Ticket Pia if tickets remain, with timings to be announced, and they are looking into a postal application route for people without internet access. What will not happen, on any date, is a same-day ticket window at the museum.

Note: There is no English ticket page and no English purchase route — the Ticket Pia application form and the payment steps are Japanese only.

If you do get a ticket, the digital ones (MOALA) work on smartphones only. They cannot be split across phones, so everyone in your group has to turn up together, and screenshots are refused at the door. Convenience-store printing is the alternative.

Resale is banned outright, and tickets traced to a resale site will be voided on the spot, with no refund and no compensation. If you genuinely cannot make your slot, Ticket Pia runs an official resale service for tickets bought through its lottery rounds.

Visitors with a disability certificate

This is the one route that sidesteps the lottery. Holders of a disability certificate — physical, intellectual, or mental health — pay half price, at ¥1,500 for general admission, and one accompanying caregiver gets the same rate. Certificates issued in other prefectures are accepted, and so are those issued overseas.

These tickets are held back from general sale, which means you can turn up and buy at the 2nd-floor ticket counter on the day, without a timed reservation, even on dates that have sold out. Caregivers should come to the counter together with the person they are accompanying, and be prepared to wait: the museum warns the counter can back up when several people arrive at once. The discount can be used once per person over the course of the run, and the certificate is checked both when you buy and when you enter.

How to get there

The Nakanoshima Museum of Art is about a 5-minute walk from Watanabebashi Station (Keihan Nakanoshima Line, Exit 2), or roughly 10 minutes on foot from Higobashi Station (Osaka Metro Yotsubashi Line, Exit 4) or JR Fukushima Station. From Osaka Station it is about a 20-minute walk.

Note that dates, opening hours, and prices are subject to change, so make sure to check the official website before you go.