Utagawa Hiroshige: The Complete Story
Utagawa Hiroshige was the poet of Japanese weather: rain, snow and dusk cut into woodblocks. Born in Edo in 1797, a fireman's son who kept the family fire post for years, he made the two print series that taught Europe how to see.
Hokusai gave the world a wave; Hiroshige gave it the walk home through the rain. Here is the quieter half of Japan's greatest export.
Utagawa Hiroshige at a glance:
1797: born in Edo into a family of hereditary fire brigade officials; he inherits the post as a boy.
1812: admitted to the Utagawa school at about 15, while still keeping the fireman's job.
1833: the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō makes him the country's painter of roads and weather.
1856: begins One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a portrait of his city rebuilt after the Ansei earthquake.
1858: dies in a cholera epidemic at 61, leaving a farewell verse about one more journey.
The fireman who drew
Hiroshige inherited his father's post in the shogun's fire brigade at 12, in 1809, orphaned within months of taking it.
He drew between watches, joined the Utagawa print school, and for years produced actors and beauties like everyone else. The fire post fed him while the style waited; he only handed the duty on formally years into his success.
The road that made him, 1833
In 1832 he travelled the Tokaido, the great coastal road from Edo to Kyoto, and the following year began publishing The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido.
The series was an immediate phenomenon: travellers, porters and inns in every weather, each station a mood.
Snow at Kambara and driving rain at Shono, pure atmosphere as subject, had no real precedent in landscape printmaking anywhere.
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One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
His last great series, begun in 1856, reinvented his own city in radical crops and aerial plunges: an eagle over the snow, cherry blossoms slicing the foreground, and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge of 1857, rain drawn as a curtain of cut lines. Van Gogh copied that print, and the Plum Orchard, stroke for stroke in oils in 1887; Monet planted his Giverny garden partly on this series' cues, and Whistler lifted its bridges.
The myth: pretty souvenirs
Because the prints were cheap and popular, sold for roughly the price of a bowl of noodles, Western criticism long filed them as travel souvenirs. The judgment of painters says otherwise: what Europe's modernists took from Hiroshige, the cropped foreground, the high viewpoint, weather as emotion, rebuilt Western picture making, a story we tell in full in How Japan Reshaped Western Art. The souvenir turned out to be the syllabus.
The monk's exit
In 1856 he shaved his head and took Buddhist vows, still publishing; in 1858 cholera swept Edo and took him at 61, mid series. His pupil married into the name and finished the Hundred Views as Hiroshige II, and within a decade of his death his prints were flooding into a newly opened Europe by the crate.
Where to see Hiroshige
The Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo rotates the finest impressions; the Brooklyn Museum holds a complete Hundred Views of Edo, and the British Museum and Boston's MFA keep deep Tokaido sets. Condition is everything with prints: early impressions glow, late ones fade.
How to print weather
Nobody printed weather like Hiroshige. The downpour of Sudden Shower over Ōhashi is carved as two overlapping systems of fine lines, cut at slightly different angles.
The sky gradients, bokashi, were wiped by hand onto the block for every sheet: no two impressions have the same evening.
Van Gogh copied the rain print stroke for stroke in oil and still could not get the rain. The carved line was already an abstraction, and he knew it.
The team behind the name
A Hiroshige was a quartet: designer, publisher who financed and chose subjects, carver who cut the cherry blocks, printer who pulled the sheets.
A print cost roughly a bowl of noodles. Travelers and armchair travelers bought the Tōkaidō set the way later centuries bought postcards and guidebooks.
The censors' seals stamped on each design now date the prints for scholars: bureaucracy, accidentally serving art history.
Edo, archived just in time
The Hundred Views began the year after the Ansei earthquake leveled whole districts; many sheets show a city freshly rebuilt, the scaffolding barely out of frame.
Within a decade of his death Edo became Tokyo, and within a century the city in the prints existed nowhere but in them.
That is partly why Japan kept buying Hiroshige long after the West discovered him: a memory palace of the vanished capital, block by block.
The Utagawa Hiroshige questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
How is he different from Hokusai? Hokusai is drama and design; Hiroshige is weather, mood and the traveller's eye.
Who copied him in Europe? Van Gogh, in oils, in 1887; Monet and Whistler absorbed him almost as directly.
When did he die? In the Edo cholera epidemic of 1858, at 61.
How many prints did he design? Estimates run past 8,000 designs, each printed in editions of thousands. Famous sheets survive in hundreds of copies, in wildly different states of fading.
How much does a Hiroshige cost? From a couple hundred dollars for a late, faded impression to six figures for a fine early Ōhashi rain or Kambara snow. Printing state and condition are everything.
More secrets to unlock
A new journey to the Western Paradise
His deathbed verse survives: he wrote that he was leaving his brush in Edo and setting out on a new journey, to see the famous sights of the Western Paradise. He meant the Buddhist afterlife; within thirty years his prints had conquered the other West too, the one with the easels.
