Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige the Japanese woodblock print designer of the Edo period (1797-1858), one of the last great masters of ukiyo-e and the creator of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. His lyrical landscapes, sensitive to weather, season and atmosphere, made him the foremost rival of Hokusai and a lasting influence on European painting and design.

Origins and Training

Hiroshige was born in Edo in 1797 with the given name Ando Tokutaro. His father was a low-ranking samurai attached to the fire brigade of the Tokugawa shogunate, and the family, though of modest means, possessed samurai status. When his parents died early, Hiroshige inherited his father's post, and for some years he combined the duties of an official with the study of art.

He applied to enter the studio of the celebrated Utagawa Toyokuni but was turned away, allegedly because the master's studio was full, and he became instead a pupil of Toyohiro, from whom he received the name Hiroshige. He learned the conventions of figure prints and illustrated books, and he produced actor portraits, warrior pictures and book illustrations in his early years.

His beginnings were slow and his output conventional, but his study of landscape and of earlier masters gradually revealed the vein of poetic observation in which his true genius lay. By the 1830s he had begun to design the landscape prints that would make his name.

The Tokaido Road

In 1832 Hiroshige travelled the Tokaido, the great highway linking Edo with the imperial capital of Kyoto, apparently as part of an official mission to deliver horses to the court. The journey provided the material for the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, a series published from about 1833 that depicted each of the post towns along the route.

The series was an immediate success. Its prints caught the experience of travel: travellers resting at inns, crossing rivers, climbing passes, sheltering from rain, waiting for ferries. Famous designs, such as the driving snow at Kambara or the sudden shower at Shono, in which figures hurry along a road beneath slanting rain, express a whole mood in a few strokes of line and colour.

The Tokaido prints answered a public appetite for images of the road, at a time when travel was restricted but popular, and they were reprinted in many editions. Together with Hokusai's Fuji series they established the landscape print as a major branch of ukiyo-e and confirmed Hiroshige as its most lyrical exponent.

Weather, Season and Atmosphere

Hiroshige's special gift was for atmosphere. He excelled at rendering rain and snow, mist and moonlight, evening and dawn, the soft gradations of sky and water. His prints often place a small human incident in an ample landscape, so that the scene feels observed rather than staged, and the viewer is invited to share the traveller's experience of light and weather.

He used bokashi, the technique of wiping the woodblock to produce a graded wash of colour, to create skies that shade from deep blue to pale, and he selected subjects that allowed him to exploit such effects. Firing the snow and evening snow at a village are among the designs in which the whole picture seems to vibrate with the cold or the fading light.

His birds and flowers, and his pictures of famous places, continue the same sensibility. A bird on a branch against a full moon, or a blossom weighed down by snow, becomes a meditation on the passing of time and the beauty of the transient, a theme deeply rooted in Japanese aesthetics.

Later Career and Major Series

Hiroshige's fame brought a flood of commissions. He produced many road series, including the Kisokaido and the Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido, and sets devoted to famous views of Edo, of Kyoto and of other regions. The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in the last years of his life, is often considered his crowning achievement.

The Edo series combines unusual viewpoints, including bold flights into the foreground and high vantage points, with an exquisite sense of colour and design. Designs such as Plum Garden at Kameido, with its great plum tree printed in close focus, show how far he had travelled from the descriptive picture toward a decorative art of great refinement.

He worked almost to the end, dying in 1858 in Edo during a cholera epidemic. His pupils continued the studio under names such as Hiroshige II, and the school remained productive even as ukiyo-e declined in the face of modernisation. His own reputation, however, would grow far beyond Japan.

Influence on Western Art

Japanese prints arrived in Europe in large numbers from the 1860s and were collected with enthusiasm by artists and designers. Hiroshige's landscapes, with their high horizons, tilted perspectives, flat areas of colour and evocative weather, offered modern painters a model of composition and mood quite unlike the academic tradition.

The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists studied him closely. Vincent van Gogh copied two of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in paint, and the flattening of space, the diagonal rain and the silhouetting of subjects against coloured grounds in his work and that of his contemporaries owe a clear debt to Hiroshige and his compatriots.

His influence extended into graphic design, poster art and photography, and the aesthetic of the passing moment, so central to his prints, entered the vocabulary of modern visual culture. He is remembered as the poet of the Tokaido and the master who taught the West to see landscape as an arrangement of colour, line and weather.

See also

• Ukiyo-e
• Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido
• One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
• Edo period