Age of Revolution
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858)
Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker.
Utagawa Hiroshige was born in Edo in 1797, the son of a fire-warden, and trained in the Utagawa school of ukiyo-e. He worked at first in the usual genres of actors and beauties, but found his true subject in landscape and the weather of the seasons — the lyric poet to Hokusai's dramatist of nature.
His breakthrough came with 'The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō' (c. 1833–34), a series following the great highway between Edo and Kyoto station by station, in rain, snow, mist, and evening light. Its blend of topographical record and atmospheric mood made it hugely popular, and Hiroshige returned again and again to the travel series and the famous view. His last great work, 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo' (1856–58), reimagined his home city in bold, close-cropped verticals — a plum tree filling the foreground, rain slanting across a bridge — that pushed design toward the daring flatness Europe would prize.
After Japan's opening, Hiroshige's prints poured into Paris alongside Hokusai's and helped ignite Japonisme. Van Gogh admired him so much that in 1887 he made careful painted copies of two of the Edo views — the sudden shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and the Kameido plum garden — now in the Van Gogh Museum, while Monet gathered Hiroshige's prints for the walls of Giverny. Hiroshige died in the great cholera epidemic of 1858.
The words the record keeps using: lyrical, atmospheric, serene, melancholy, poetic, observant, tender.
At a glance
- Lived 1797–1858
- Origin Japanese
- Worked in Edo (Tokyo)
- Era Age of Revolution
- Movements Ukiyo-e
- Mediums Polychrome woodblock print
- Techniques Keyblock and color-block printing, Bokashi gradation
Works in the archive
- Shōno: Driving Rain (from The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō), 1833 (From the Hōeidō edition of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō)
The forty-sixth station of the Tōkaidō and one of the most admired prints in the whole of ukiyo-e: travellers caught on a bare hillside in a sudden downpour, palanquin-bearers scrambling one way as figures under… - Kanbara: Night Snow (from The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō), 1833 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Hōeidō Tōkaidō))
A hushed mountain village under deep night snow, three muffled figures making their way between dark houses buried to the eaves. One of the quietest and most poetic prints of the Tōkaidō series — a study in silence,… - Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo), 1857 (From One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (impressions in the Brooklyn Museum, the Met, and elsewhere))
Figures hurry across the great wooden Shin-Ōhashi bridge, hunched under umbrellas and mats as a cloudburst sweeps down; a raft drifts on the grey river below and the far bank of Atake dissolves in rain. Van Gogh made a… - Plum Park in Kameido (from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo), 1857 (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (One Hundred Famous Views of Edo))
The trunk of a famous flowering plum tree at the Kameido shrine fills the entire foreground, thrusting up close to the picture plane, while behind it visitors and a red-and-green garden recede into a graded red sky. Van…
What was said
Scholarship credits Hiroshige with turning the famous-view print into a vehicle for mood and season, giving each place its particular weather and hour through masterful bokashi gradation and Prussian-blue skies, and prizing atmosphere as highly as topographical accuracy.
In Paris in 1887 Vincent van Gogh painted close copies in oil of two of Hiroshige's Edo views — the sudden shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and the flowering plum tree at Kameido — even adding borders of imitation Japanese characters; both paintings are held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
After Japan's opening, Hiroshige's prints reached Paris in quantity and, with Hokusai's, became a touchstone of Japonisme; their flat colour, close cropping, and weather-mood were studied by van Gogh, Monet, and their circle.
Lineage
Passed on to Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh
What would Hiroshige make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Utagawa Hiroshige", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Hiroshige · Keep a life moment the way Hiroshige would · Pictures made after Hiroshige