Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige was the last great master of the ukiyo-e woodblock print, and the artist who made landscape its central subject. Born in Edo in 1797, the son of a fire warden in the shogun's service, he inherited his father's post at twelve when both parents died within months, and held it for years while training as an artist. He entered the Utagawa school under Toyohiro around 1811. For two decades he produced conventional prints of actors and beautiful women without particular distinction. In 1832 he travelled the Tōkaidō, the coastal highway between Edo and Kyoto, reportedly with an official delegation escorting horses to the imperial court. The series that followed, The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, published from 1833, made his reputation and changed the market. The prints show ordinary travellers in rain, snow and mist, with weather and atmosphere as the true subject, and they sold in enormous numbers. He worked with an economy that came partly from the medium's constraints — flat colour areas, hard contours — and partly from choice, using the bokashi gradient technique to grade a sky, cropping foreground objects abruptly, and framing distant scenes through a branch or a doorway. He produced perhaps 8,000 designs. One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in his last years from 1856, includes the vertical compositions that most struck European artists; Vincent van Gogh copied two in oil, and their influence on Whistler, Monet and the Japonisme of the period was direct. He became a Buddhist monk in 1856. He died in the cholera epidemic of 1858, leaving a poem about leaving his brush in the east and travelling to see the famous views of the western land.

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