Utagawa Hiroshige

The last great master of the ukiyo-e woodblock print tradition and the artist whose landscape and travel series most decisively shaped Western perception of Japanese visual culture in the late 19th century. Hiroshige was born Andō Tokutarō in Edo (now Tokyo) into a samurai family that held the hereditary post of fire warden; he entered the studio of the woodblock artist Toyohiro at fourteen and began publishing prints from around 1818. His early work followed the conventions of the tradition — actor portraits, bijin-ga (beautiful woman subjects) — but his career was transformed in 1832 when he joined an official procession travelling the Tōkaidō highway between Edo and Kyoto. The resulting series, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (published 1833–34), was an immediate popular sensation. Its fifty-five designs — a set for each of the fifty-three post stations plus Edo and Kyoto — captured the variety of Japanese landscape and seasonal atmosphere with a warmth, specificity and weather-consciousness that the tradition had not previously achieved at this scale. Hiroshige designed more than five thousand prints across his career, including multiple complete Tōkaidō series and the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), which depicts his home city through bold compositions of rain, snow, blossoms, fireworks and summer haze. When his prints reached Europe in the 1860s, packed as padding in trade shipments, they affected French painting with the force of revelation. Van Gogh copied two of them — Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge — directly in oil, with a specific intention to understand how Hiroshige's colored line worked. Whistler, Degas, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec all studied his compositional methods. Hiroshige died of cholera in the great Edo epidemic of 1858, having taken Buddhist vows the previous year. He was sixty-two.