Utagawa Hiroshige
The woodblock master of landscape and weather.
Utagawa Hiroshige depicted journeys and places in series such as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Van Gogh copied two of his pictures.
Utagawa Hiroshige was born in Edo, present-day Tokyo, in 1797, the son of a fire warden in the service of the shogunate. The family name was Andō, and Hiroshige inherited his father's post while still young. Around 1811 he became a pupil of the woodblock artist Utagawa Toyohiro and was given the name Hiroshige. In his early years he made actor portraits and pictures of women, but without much success.
His breakthrough came with landscape. After a journey along the Tōkaidō, the great road between Edo and Kyoto, he published the series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō in 1833–34. It was a success, since travel was increasing and many people wanted pictures of places they had visited or dreamed of. The claim that he travelled with an official delegation of the shogunate is disputed. Later works include The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō, made together with Keisai Eisen, and, towards the end of his life, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo from 1856–58, which in fact comprises more than a hundred sheets.
Hiroshige was the artist of weather and mood. Rain, snow, mist, moonlight and dusk carry the pictures as much as the places themselves. He often used the new Prussian blue and soft colour gradations in the sky, and he cropped his subjects boldly, so that a branch, a bridge or a horse's leg can dominate the foreground. The people in his pictures are small but lively: travellers, porters and fishermen going about their daily business.
He was enormously productive and made thousands of prints, and the quality of later editions can vary because publishers reprinted popular sheets many times. Hiroshige withdrew for a time as a Buddhist monk but continued to work. He died in Edo in 1858, probably in the cholera epidemic that ravaged the city that year.
In Europe Hiroshige became one of the most important sources of Japonisme. In 1887 Vincent van Gogh copied two sheets from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over the Shin-Ōhashi Bridge, in oil. The copies are now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Whistler and Monet were also influenced by his way of depicting light, weather and water.