Hiroshige

Japanese poet

• Born: 1797
• Birthplace: Edo (now Tokyo), Japan
• Died: October 12, 1858
• Place of death: Edo (now Tokyo), Japan

Famed for his poetic landscapes, Hiroshige was one of the last masters of the ukiyo-e woodblock prints in Japan and is permanently inextricably linked with an artist named Hokusai in historical reputation.

Early Life

Andō Hiroshige (hihr-oh-shee-gay) was born Andō Tokutarō. His father, Andō Gen’emon, was an official of the fire department attached to Edo Castle. Hiroshige’s talent for drawing surfaced early; even as a child, he showed an interest in art. First he studied with Okajima Rinsai, a painter and also a fireman, who had been trained in the traditional Kano school of classical Chinese academic painting. Hiroshige’s mother died when he was twelve years old, and when his father resigned shortly thereafter, Hiroshige was obliged to assume the hereditary duties. Attempting to study with the popular Utagawa Toyokuni, he was turned down; persevering, he managed, however, when he was fourteen, to be accepted as a pupil of the less popular Utagawa Toyohiro.

The following year, Hiroshige was allowed to use the name “Utagawa Hiroshige,” a sign of his promise as an artist. Despite this honor, Hiroshige did not publish until 1818, when book illustrations with the signature Ichiyūsai Hiroshige appeared. When Hiroshige was thirty-one, his master died, but Hiroshige did not take over his name or his studio, as would have been customary for the best pupil to do. About this time, he called himself “Ichiyūsai,” then dropped the first character and signed himself simply “Ryusai.”

Art historians sometimes divide Hiroshige’s artistic career into three stages. In his student days, from 1811 to 1830, he spent his time learning from his predecessors, working on the figure prints of actors and warriors, and, in his mid-twenties, on figure prints of beautiful women. Lessons with Ōoka Umpō taught Hiroshige the Chinese-influenced Nanga style of painting, with its use of calligraphy in depicting landscape. From the Shijō style of painting, Hiroshige learned the art of using ink washes in paintings for a softer effect. His master, Toyohiro, passed on the Western technique of the single-point perspective, which he himself had learned from his teacher, Toyoharu. Hiroshige’s early, limited success came from his representation of flowers and birds, sometimes with his own accompanying poem. Prints of these are rarer than his landscapes and are much treasured.

Life’s Work

Hiroshige’s early work featured sketches of warriors, courtesans, actors, and other subjects typical of ukiyo-e , the art form that resulted from the political and geographical shift of power from Kyoto, the old capital, to Edo. By the time Hiroshige was born, Edo, a relatively new capital established by the Tokugawa shogunate, had turned into a populous city with more than one million inhabitants. Because of the complexity of the caste system then prevailing, the change in the capital of the country led to a series of other complex artistic, social, and commercial changes that defined the art form Hiroshige was to master so successfully.

The main patrons of the arts in the old capital of Kyoto, the wealthy merchants called machischū, refused to be lured by the economic possibilities offered by the new capital, leaving the path open for merchants of a lower class (chōnin) to profit from Edo’s position as the commercial capital of Japan. Though now successful economically, the lower-class merchants still had no social clout. In search of entertainment, they would seek out the pleasure districts that sprang up outside the city limits and allowed members of different classes to mingle. This “floating world” was composed of the world of the highly trained and respected courtesans in the pleasure districts, and the art form that evolved to record their activities was the ukiyo-e woodblock print.

Although the staple subject of the ukiyo-e print was the varying fashions in hair, dress, customs, and manners of the evanescent world of the pleasure districts, the landscapes of which Hiroshige became a skilled master had always been traditional in Japanese painting, if only as background for the figures in ukiyo-e prints.

In the second and most productive stage of his career, from about 1830 to 1844, Hiroshige left the competitive field of figure designs and concentrated on landscapes. His most famous and finest series seemed to be a result of a journey he took around 1832, directly connected to his family tenure. The shogun in Edo, the real seat of power, annually presented horses from his stables to the emperor, secluded in Kyoto. As a minor official of the shogunate, Hiroshige joined the expedition so as to Kyoto to paint the ceremony of the presentation for the shogun. During the journey, he made several sketches of the Tōkaidō, as the main highway between Edo and Kyoto was called.

These sketches were the basis of the first Tōkaidō Gojūsantsugi (fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō), a collection of fifty-five scenes consisting of the fifty-three stations on the highway and one each in Kyoto and Nihonbashi, the beginning and ending of the road. Published separately at first, the complete series was issued as a set in 1834. It brought Hiroshige immediate and enduring fame and success. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, in response to popular demand, Hiroshige designed some twenty additional sets of these views of the Tōkaidō.

Hiroshige’s prints were so popular that some of his designs had runs of ten thousand, and he was kept so busy producing a series of prints on Edo, the suburbs, Lake Biwa at Otsu, and Kyoto that he was seldom present to direct the reproduction of his designs. Greedy publishers were responsible for turning out inferior copies of his designs in their haste to cash in on their popularity, and Hiroshige himself was not consistently good.

The first Tōkaidō series is considered the most original of his landscape series. What distinguished Hiroshige’s vision of the highway were his personal and direct reactions to what he saw. Though inspired by the landscape, Hiroshige adapted freely; he changed the seasons or the time of day or added nonexistent features if his sense of composition required it. Unlike the famous Hokusai, Hiroshige was interested in the human drama around him, not merely in the possibility of the design. Thus, his prints are praised for their humorous point of view, their warmth and compassion, and their close observation of the changing atmospheric conditions, their poetic sensitivity to the relationship between humans and nature. He is even referred to as master of rain, mist, snow, and wind.

In the third stage of his career, from around 1844 to his death in 1858, Hiroshige became more interested in depicting figures in his landscapes. He worked in collaboration with Utagawa Kunisada, a figure print designer, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a designer of historical prints, to produce another Tōkaidō series jointly. Kunisada added the figures to Hiroshige’s landscapes; the two also produced several other series. Meisho Edo Hyakkei (1856-1858; one hundred views of Edo), which Hiroshige produced at the age of sixty, is particularly remarkable for the interesting points of view and the placement of the figures in the landscape.

By this time, Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. fleet had intruded upon the closed Japanese society. Japan’s opening its market to world trade brought the end of the feudal Tokugawa era and the way of life reflected in the ukiyo-e prints. With the passing of Hiroshige, who probably died in the great cholera epidemic in 1858, went the world he had recorded with such wit and warmth.

Because popular artists were not deemed worthy of official records, relatively little is known of Hiroshige’s personal life. Such skimpy details as are known suggest a life of personal sorrows. Not only was Hiroshige orphaned as a teenager, but his family also had to be rebuilt. He was married twice, once to Tatsu, the widow of a samurai, by whom he had one son, Nakajiro; his wife died in 1840, his son in 1845. Hiroshige’s second wife, Yasu, was twenty years younger. His small government pension kept Hiroshige from starving, but he was hardly ever a wealthy man.

Despite these personal setbacks, Hiroshige was a fun-loving man who was enormously productive as an artist. It is estimated, for example, that Hiroshige designed eight thousand woodcuts and that more than forty publishers were involved in publishing his designs. He was also enormously popular in his day, once receiving a commission from thirty innkeepers who wanted prints of their winehouses to present as souvenirs to their guests.

Significance

The last major figure in the development of ukiyo-e, Hiroshige is inextricably linked with Hokusai in historical reputation. Hiroshige was the more melancholy, romantic, and poetic artist, but like most of the great Edo masters of the woodblock print who came from middle-class artisan families, his work, intended for and appealing primarily to bourgeois circles, was not considered fine art until Western artists, particularly the Impressionists, discovered and glorified the woodblock print. The prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the last of the masters, were at the time still readily obtainable. The roster of great Western artists influenced by them includes James Whistler, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.

James Michener, while criticizing Hiroshige for his weak designs, his undistinguished drawing, and his lack of focus, accords him the rare talent of an “honest, clean eye.” Though many of the Hiroshige prints available are the late copies that do not convey his subtlety, he is probably the most accessible of the ukiyo-e artists because, in Michener’s words, Hiroshige’s inspired eye “can teach an entire nation, or even a substantial segment of the world, to see.”

Bibliography

Addiss, Stephen, ed. Tōkaidō, Adventures on the Road in Old Japan. Lawrence, Kans.: Spencer Museum of Art, 1980. A collection of essays about the Tōkaidō, including chapters on Hiroshige’s humor and his Tōkaidō prints in the context of traditional Japanese painting.

Andō, Hiroshige. The Fifty-three Stages of Tōkaidō. Edited by Ichitaro Kondo. English adaptation by Charles S. Terry. Tokyo, Japan: Nippon Express, 1960. A brief introduction to Hiroshige’s most popular series. Each print is accompanied by text in English and Japanese.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Hiroshige. Edited by Walter Exner. London: Methuen, 1960. An oversized book, with large-print text and color plates throughout. Contains a general introduction to the life and work of Hiroshige, written by the son of the Viennese art dealer who collected Hiroshige’s work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Sketchbooks of Hiroshige. Introduction and commentaries on the plates by Sherman E. Lee. Foreword by Daniel J. Boorstin. 2d ed. New York: George Braziller, 2001. Features reproductions of Hiroshige’s sketches that were drawn as he traveled in Japan around 1840.

Faulkner, Rupert. Hiroshige Fan Prints. London: V & A, 2001. Contains full-color reproductions of the 126 Hiroshige fan prints owned by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and comments about each print.

Jansen, Marije. Hiroshige’s Journey in the Sixty-Odd Provinces. Amsterdam: Hotei, 2004. Contains color reproductions of this series of Hiroshige woodblock prints, with a detailed description of each print and notes on variations evident in the different paintings.

Lane, Richard. Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978. Provides historical background, tracing the rise of ukiyo-e through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contains color photographs, a bibliography, an index, and an illustrated dictionary of ukiyo-e.

Michener, James A. The Floating World. New York: Random House, 1954. Traces the life and death of the art known as ukiyo-e through the individual artists who practiced it. Contains sixty-five prints, a chronological table, brief biographies, a bibliography, and an index.

Narazaki, Muneshige. Studies in Nature: Hokusai-Hiroshige. Translated by John Bester. Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha International, 1970. Focuses on the achievements of these two artists in the depiction of flowers and birds, with a brief introduction to the development of the genre.

Whitford, Frank. Japanese Prints and Western Painters. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Discusses the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on European painting in the nineteenth century. Contains a chronology, a glossary, a bibliography, an index, and color plates.