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In 2015, the Muscarelle Museum of Art drew more than 60,000 viewers to its groundbreaking exhibit of original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.

It was just one exhibit by the museum, including recent Michelangelo and Caravaggio shows, to bring once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunities to the heart of Williamsburg.

The opportunities continue in 2016. On Feb. 6, the Muscarelle introduces three exhibitions: “Hiroshige’s Tokaido,” “Light Works: A Century of Great Photography” and “Norman Rockwell and the Boy Scouts.”

The exhibitions offer a chance to experience, up close, many iconic works.

“You’re going to know half or most of these images, but have never actually seen the original,” said John T. Spike, the Muscarelle’s assistant director and chief curator. “There is quite a fundamental difference to seeing something reduced in size for print and seeing the actual size of it.”

Even more, there was intentionality behind the juxtaposition of these specific exhibits.

Japanese woodblock prints, photography, American illustration — “They’re diverse on purpose,” Spike said.

“We try to think about what engages people,” said Aaron De Groft, the Muscarelle’s director and CEO.

All three exhibits open Feb. 6, remaining open until August.

‘Hiroshige’s Tokaido’

With nearly 250 prints by Utagawa Hiroshige, the celebrated Japanese woodblock artist, “Hiroshige’s Tokaido” presents an unprecedented view of the most traveled road in old Japan.

Following the Eastern coastline of Japan, the Tokaido road connected Kyoto to Edo (now Tokyo), and was one of the “Five Roads” of Japan’s Edo Period, roughly spanning the 17th to 19th centuries.

The exhibit highlights the 55 prints of Hiroshige’s renowned first set, “Hoeido Tokaido,” but it also includes four additional sets from Hiroshige’s “The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road.”

“By showing five of the most important sets together, which has never been done before, it’s important not only to understand Japanese landscape, (and) the work of the great artist Hiroshige,” De Groft said, “but that he took each station and he showed them from a different vantage point or a different angle.”

“It’s a lot like Google Earth,” De Groft said.

On loan from the Ronin Gallery in New York, “These are precisely the kinds of works that influenced … the French impressionists,” Spike said. “It fits into the history of Western art.”

‘Light Works’

“Light Works: A Century of Great Photography” fills the Muscarelle’s second floor gallery with more than 50 photographs from the last century — from names such as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Stieglitz.

“These are famous photographs. Iconic photographs,” De Groft said. Photographs that span the evolution of the medium.

Consider Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking photographs of animals in motion from 1887, Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” taken in 1936 or Andy Warhol’s Polaroids of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s mother in 1984.

This traveling exhibition from the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts is rounded out by about 10 photographs from the Muscarelle’s permanent photography collection. De Groft said the collection, built in recent years, has never been displayed before. It includes works by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and Lazlo Passi Norberto.

Following a walk through “Light Works,” guests can head to the museum’s back lawn to explore a walk-in “camera obscura,” or dark room.

Norman Rockwell

Featuring nine Norman Rockwell paintings on loan from the National Scouting Museum, “Norman Rockwell and the Boy Scouts” celebrates, as De Groft said, “one of the most recognizable names in American Art.”

But the exhibit is a well-timed celebration of many things.

It is dedicated to Robert Gates, William and Mary chancellor and former U.S. defense secretary. Gates also serves as president of Boy Scouts of America, an organization that was founded on Feb. 8, 1910. That same day, in 1693, marks the day William and Mary was chartered.

The exhibit was an opportunity to honor the contributions of two American institutions, De Groft said.

Bridges can be reached by phone at 757-275-4934.

Want to go?

When: Closed Monday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Friday; noon-4 p.m., Saturday-Sunday

Where: 603 Jamestown Road, Williamsburg

Tickets: $10

Info: muscarelle.org, 221-2700