Ando Hiroshige is one of the most prolific figures to have emerged from the Ukiyo-e school of woodblock print artists. His work – over 5,400 woodblock prints alone – saturated the marketplaces and souvenir stands of nineteenth-century Edo, Japan, during the heyday of his career. These images were some of the first Japanese prints to reach Western eyes and influence Western art. Today, Hiroshige is known for the accuracy, skill and grace with which he captured and preserved the world of nineteenth century Japan.

Born in 1797 in Edo, Japan, Hiroshige’s artistic inclinations surfaced at an early age. A popular story relates that when he was nine years old, he was party to a procession of Ryuku Islanders journeying to Edo, and he surprised his companions by sketching a good likeness of the tribesmen. He is also said to have experimented with various natural materials such as colored sand and stone in making miniature landscapes.

Orphaned in 1809, he assumed the appointed post for all males in his family - as a fire watchman for the city. Three years later (after first being rejected) he entered into an apprenticeship under the renowned woodblock print artist Utagawa Toyohiro. Within a short time, Hiroshige was honored by being allowed to take his master’s surname, a recognition of artistic maturity that usually took years to earn. After passing his post as fire watchmen to his young nephew, Hiroshige worked for years in the print tradition of ukiyo-e, illustrating books and manuscripts, and producing several individual prints of famous actors and legendary warriors. He also married the daughter of one of his contemporaries in the fireman’s brigade, and established a spacious household of his own in the Ogamachi district of Edo.

The death of his master in 1828 marked a turning point in Hiroshige’s career. Freed from his obligations to the school of woodblock printing his master adhered to, Hiroshige began creating nature scenes of birds, flowers, and landscapes and signing his work with the pseudonym Ichiryusai, meaning “I stand alone”. Hiroshige’s break from tradition was complete with the publication of his first attempt at landscape art in 1831, entitled Famous Places in the Eastern Capital. Though well-received, his first album of ten landscape prints did little to help his career. Subject to the success of his artwork to support himself and his household, Hiroshige’s income varied greatly, and several instances occurred in which he sold off pieces of his wife’s clothing and jewelry to finance his craft and his travels.

On one such journey, in 1831 or 1832, Hiroshige set off from Edo with an entourage of horses intended for the emperor seated in the imperial city of Kyoto. His observations along the Tokaido or “Eastern Sea Route,” a highway that stretched along the east coast of Japan connecting the metropolitan cities of Edo and Kyoto would provide the subject matters for the most successful venture of his career. Commissioned to make sketches of the journey, Hiroshige also kept a private travel journal in which he recorded scenes from the various resting stations, landmarks, and checkpoints that provided security, diversions, and encouraged commerce along what was, at the time, the busiest highway in the world.

Upon returning home, Hiroshige set to work designing prints from his sketches, which he began releasing separately in 1833. In 1834 the Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido, a complete series of color prints, was released. Though the Tokaido was a popular topic in the art and literature of Japan well before Hiroshige’s time, his prints were instant successes for two reasons. Hiroshige was the first artist to dedicate a full-fledged series of landscape prints to capture the people, places, and feel of the Tokaido. Second, Hiroshige’s careful attention to detail and masterful composition, enabled viewers to take a virtual tour of the Tokaido for a fraction of the cost and effort of the real thing.
After publishing Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido, Hiroshige had the economic mobility to exercise his interest in the art of the landscape. He continued to travel widely, and produced more landscape series with titles such as Famous Places of the Eastern Capital (Edo), Famous Places of Kyoto, and Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces. Hiroshige also produced a print series entitled Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Highway, depicting another important trade route in nineteenth-century Japan. He focused several of his print series on the natural wonders of Japan, the most famous of which are Eight Views of Lake Biwa and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Reworked and re-released by Hiroshige until 1855, his Tokaido series alone went through nearly twenty separate editions.

In 1839, following the death of his first wife, Hiroshige married Oyasu, a farmer’s daughter several years his junior. He adopted a girl named Otatsu, the daughter of his brother, a priest, and continued to pursue the art of landscape design. Despite his success, he continued to struggle financially due to the fact that he was a generous entertainer and amorous socialite. A moody and compulsive artist, Hiroshige would spend weeks wrapped in a fervor of creativity, working frantically on his sketches and prints, only to suddenly become sullen and withdrawn for weeks afterwards. Often, Oyasu would handle the administrative end of his career, delivering his first-edition prints to wealthy clients, from whom she was also forced to borrow money.

Hiroshige retired in 1856 with a last series of prints entitled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Due to the ever- increasing demand in the market for his images of landscapes and nature scenes, and Hiroshige’s rush to fulfill it, the work preceding his retirement paled in artistic comparison to that of his earlier prints.

A cholera epidemic of disastrous proportions swept through the city of Edo in August of 1858. On September 2, Hiroshige contracted the disease, and began to prepare his will and compose his epitaph. A Zen Buddhist, he included an ancient proverb in his will which read:

I am dying;
treatment in Hades
And all else
depends on money.
When I die
don’t burn me, don’t bury me;
just throw me in a field
and fatten some empty-bellied dog.

He instructed his executor, “With the same light feeling as in this old verse I would like to just be carried to some field,” adding, “Absolutely no elaborations are needed.” Hiroshige died of cholera on September 6, 1858 at the age of sixty-one.

In keeping with tradition, responsibility fell on the publisher of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo to produce and release a shinie or death portrait of Hiroshige. Executed by his friend Toyukuni III, the shinie also contained Hiroshige’s birth date, date of death, original name, pseudonyms, family temple, and his selected jisei, or final verse. Hiroshige’s self-composed final verse read:

I leave my brush in the East
And set forth on my journey.
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.

Hiroshige’s career flourished at the tail-end of the Edo period, a social and cultural epoch that spanned over two and a half centuries and came to a halt when the Tokugawa shogunate crumbled in 1868. His work, along with that of his contemporary, rival, and the elder, Hokusai, helped to revive interest in the dying art of landscape and to refresh a genre flooded with images of beautiful women and celebrated actors. Hiroshige’s woodblock prints dominated the end of an era hallmarked by the development of an affluent, indulgent middle class. They also catalogue the people, places, and events of a long-vanished world.

Japan’s Edo Period, which lasted from 1600-1868, ushered in a variety of social and cultural changes and gave rise to the ukiyo-e movement. Ukiyo-e was rooted in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when artists began bridging the gap between high-brow and low-brow art. Artists began fusing woodblock printing techniques traditionally reserved for prayer scrolls and employed in monasteries and by royalty with the art of illustration, and began decorating books, posters, screens, and fans. Through their application of traditional painting and woodblock techniques to new subject matters and genres, artists perpetuated Ukiyo-e’s interest in the temporal, everyday world of the middle class during the Edo period, and reiterated the concerns of traditional painting with their depiction of mood, emotion, and perspective.

Though mainly concerned with the popular culture of an urban Japanese middle class in mind, the ukiyo-e movement underwent several dramatic changes over time. Early woodblock print artists borrowed their techniques and inspiration almost exclusively from more orthodox schools of art. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, artists began to produce black and white prints depicting traditional Japanese themes: nature, landscapes, and women, and also to explore the burgeoning world of courtesans and Kabuki theater. Artists such as the book illustrator Hishikawa Moronobu and the versatile Okumara Masanabu, pioneered the Ukiyo-e movement through their avid interest in and creative depictions of the “floating world” of brothels and theatres. Instead of using printmaking to mass-produce cheap copies of famous paintings or scrolls, as was popular in Europe at the time, early woodblock artists defined the print as an individual art form and used it to render original images inspired by traditional designs.

By the eighteenth century, as printing techniques became increasingly complex, and a more diverse palette of colors became available, most artists moved past the tan-e or “hand-colored” and urushi or “lacquer” methods of printing. Increasingly, artists became divided into different schools of print design and method. Several famous schools of woodblock printing were founded during this period, and grew in theoretical and technical complexity as time wore on. Soon, brilliant colors became available for use in printmaking, and artists seized upon the opportunity to fill their work with indigo blue and crimson hues. The calendar artist Suzuki Harunobu blended his use of brilliant colors with a tendency towards unusual composition, and founded a tradition to which pupils flocked. Kabuki theatre artist Katsukawa Shunsho helped to perpetuate the popularity of prints depicting famous actors and their roles. Other artists founded schools dedicated to the depiction of beautiful women, still-life, and nature scenes.

By the nineteenth century, the Edo Period’s cultural odyssey of self-definition and appreciation reached new heights. The red light and theatre districts of cities such as Edo and Kyoto became infamous areas of pleasure and release. As the popularity of the red light districts of bustling cities grew, artists increasingly turned to them for inspiration. Eager to feed the demands of the Japanese middle class who demanded a bright and decorative art form of their own which mimicked that of the samurai class, but could be devoid of symbolic meaning, artists came to center their prints on actors and courtesans, and to make careers for themselves as poster and advertising artists. Though style and execution varied from artist to artist, images remained the same, until the early 19th century, when two artists would breathe new life into an art that increasingly only seemed to serve courtesans and actors.

Katsushika Hokusai’s and Ando Hiroshige’s careers took wing at the end of the art movement their names would come to dominate. By the mid-nineteenth century woodblock prints of courtesans and actors were exhausted images in the markets of Japan. Though both artists began their careers by drawing scenes from the pleasure quarters, and experimenting in still-lifes, illustrations, and warrior-prints, they found fame through the skill with which they revived the art of the landscape. Hokusai’s work, on the market for nearly two decades before Hiroshige was born, represented a versatile and experimental style characteristic of the artist. Hokusai turned to landscapes as his career progressed and as he tired of depicting the pretty women and stage talents of the floating world. Hiroshige, on the other hand, gravitated towards landscapes upon the death of his master, and pursued their depiction throughout the remainder of his career. He was skilled at infusing his work with the visual sensations appropriate to create various moods and emotions throughout his compositions, and was known as a master artist of snow and of rain. Hiroshige’s most famous series of prints, entitled The 53 Stations of the Tokaido, went through several editions. Several of the images from the various Tokaido series are what Hiroshige is most famous for, including The Plum Garden at Kameido, Morning Mist at Mishima Station, and Twilight at Numazu Station. The reception Hiroshige’s landscapes received in the Japanese market and the increased demand for his masterful depictions of treasured national shrines, both natural and man-made, helped carry his fame and career to well past the end of the Edo Period in 1868, ten years after his death.