Works by Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige began making landscapes around 1830, and printed his views of Edo and the roads out of it in soft gradations of colour, often laid down in several impressions.

In 1832 a place in an official procession to Kyoto took him along the Tōkaidō, the road between the two capitals; he sketched as he went, and back in Edo made the sketches into a print series on the road's fifty-three post stations. His travellers walk in rain, in snow and in every season.

He began One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 1856, the year he became a Buddhist monk, and a rich priest paid for the series in advance. In it he often set something large in the foreground for depth, a device taken from Western art. A dark, knotted plum trunk crosses the Plum Garden at Kameido in front of a red sky, with visitors small behind a fence, and in an eagle over the snowy plain at Susaki the bird's wings span the top of the sheet while a lone bucket floats on the water below. Atagoshita in Winter, from the same series, shows an Edo street in falling snow: walkers bend under straw hats and umbrellas, sparrows dart overhead and a canal runs deep blue beside the white road.

He also led the way in standing landscape prints upright, in a series of famous places in each of the sixty-odd provinces. In that series the full moon over Mount Kyōdai shows again in each flooded rice terrace beneath it, and at the Naruto whirlpool the sea coils into a spiral between rocks white with spray.

Sources: Wikipedia, Rijksmuseum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Finnish National Gallery. Portrait: Utagawa Kunisada.