The British Museum is currently celebrating the life, work, and legacy of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), one of Japan’s most popular and prolific artists through a selection of prints, paintings, books, and sketches. The artist’s engaging way of depicting landscape, nature, and daily life in print was popular in Japan in his own day and continues to influence and inspire today. This is the first exhibition on Utagawa Hiroshige in London for 25 years, and the first at the museum. It marks a major gift of 35 Hiroshige prints to the American Friends of the British Museum from the collection of Alan Medaugh, a leading US collector of the artist’s work. These are shown alongside 82 other prints also on loan from the Medaugh Collection, as well as key national and international loans, and important works chosen from the Museum collection.
Utagawa Hiroshige’s long career coincided with the last decades of Japan’s Edo period (1615-1868), a time of rapid change that eventually brought an end to samurai rule. As Japan confronted the encroaching outside world and the pressures of modernisation, Hiroshige’s calm artistic vision encouraged a sense of continuity and hope. Possessed of outstanding technical skills as both a colourist and draftsman, Hiroshige is recognised for crossing social boundaries, as can be seen in his landscape prints and his unusual compositions, which often include humorous depictions of people involved in everyday activities in great detail, as well as skilfully rendered expressions of weather, light, and the seasons.
From fashionable figures in his early career to quiet city views, remote landscapes, and impressions of nature in his mature years, Utagawa Hiroshige captured many fascinating aspects of daily life in 19th-century Japan. A superb colourist, he discovered a lyricism in the experience of travel, and a bond between people and the natural world. In the landscape series such as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road (1833-35), he expressed the population’s growing interest in domestic travel, devoting more than 20 series to this one highway alone. This journey became the collection of 55 landscape prints for which the artist has long since been celebrated. The artist vividly depicts the route along Honshu’s eastern coastline, down which endless crowds of itinerant merchants, pilgrims, artisans and daimyo (samurai feudal lords) travelled from Edo to Kyoto. The series – a move away from subject-focused woodblock prints – followed Hokusai’s illustrious Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1830-32) in contributing to the burgeoning ukiyo-e style of meisho (famous views).
Twenty years later, Utagawa Hiroshige found renewed vigour in the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-58), in which he boldly expanded the classical concept of ‘famous places’. His landscape prints became treasured souvenirs and vehicles for imaginative escape. They were not strict representations of place but evocations in which he blended direct observation and study of guidebooks with artistic interpretation and cultural resonance.
A section of the exhibition explores Hiroshige’s main travel series and presents some of the finest surviving examples of major designs from One Hundred Views, along with pristine examples of less-familiar designs from the series.
Utagawa Hiroshige was born under the name of Ando Tokutaro in 1797. His father was a fire warden of samurai stock. His father and mother died within a year of each other when he was just twelve, leaving a duty to protect Edo castle from fire to the orphaned Ando. At fourteen, Ando became a pupil of the celebrated ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Yoyahiro, and it was from this point that his infatuation with the world of print making developed. Working under the newly acquired name of Hiroshige, he began to depict the subjects upon which the floating world artists focused by producing bijin-ga (prints of beautiful women) and yakusha-e (actor prints) of those who sought celebrity in the entertainment district in Edo. Hiroshige eventually gave up these figurative prints in favour of the landscapes for which he found fame, and in this change of subject he was influenced by his contemporary and fellow ukiyo-e master Hokusai Katsushika.
Hiroshige’s first success with the series Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road was instant and went on to be reproduced in many versions, including a large number made from worn blocks that were of a lesser quality. The artist’s production of these landscape prints was prodigious in the mid- to late 1830s, and during this period a certain amount of repetition of subject matter can be seen. Ellis Tinois., in the book Japanese Prints, describes how in the last five years of his life, Hiroshige’s landscape print designs underwent a transformation. That there was a break with his past practice is most obvious in the shifting of the orientation of his ‘large size’ (oban) print designs from the horizontal to vertical. The switch reinvigorated Hiroshige’s output as a print designer. He also experimented with new compositional devices and exploited to great advantage the denser pigments and more saturated printing processes that characterised all prints produced in the 1850s.
Utagawa Hiroshige’s inclusive vision is evident in his designs for hand-held printed fans (uchiwa-e), a practical, affordable and disposable art form that served to find a place for beauty in daily life. Created between the 1830s and 1850s, they are among the rarest and most elaborate in the artist’s oeuvre, making him one of the last great image-makers of Edo-period Japan (1603-1868). These fan leaves reveal the graphic inventiveness and diversity of his work, from famous sites in the city of Edo and landscapes of Japanese provinces, to subtle compositions of flowers and birds, as well as female portraits, historical and literary scenes, and parodic images.
A seasonal and ephemeral accessory, the flat bamboo fan became popular in Japan during the Edo period and became one of the creative outlets for the masters of Japanese ukiyo-e. Initially sold during the summer by peddlers, or in temporary stalls during festivals, Edo fans were offered from the late 18th century onwards in the windows of print and illustrated book dealers and were eventually signed by famous artists. As disposable objects, these fans have mostly disappeared; however, some of these prints have survived, uncut and in their first printing, as they were never mounted on their frames and preserved by print publishers or collectors. This aspect of Utagawa Hiroshige’s work is seldom exhibited outside Japan and comprises one of the main sections of the exhibition.
Also on show are unique examples, including a print from the series Eight Views of Stations along the Main and Secondary Roads (circa 1839) that is on display for the first time. There are also Hiroshige’s bird-and-flower prints that he produced throughout his career and reflect both his natural artistic elegance and the relatively high level of literacy reached during the period, as they often include a Japanese or Chinese poem inscribed in flowing calligraphy. Signalling an appreciation for art shared across social classes, they highlight the profound connections in Japanese culture between nature, art, and poetry and the artist’s ability to turn a Chinese genre into a Japanese art form. Bird and flower painting rose in China during the late Tang dynasty (618-907), when emperors and the court enjoyed the colour, technical virtuosity, and poetic overtones of this form of painting. The genre first arrived in Japan with the introduction of Chinese paintings and then through the woodblock-printed manuals and art books of the Ming (1369-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.
As well as exploring Hiroshige’s diverse strengths, the exhibition considers his global legacy and how his innovative compositions, vibrant colours, and deep understanding of pictorial perspective have inspired European masters such as Van Gogh and Whistler, as well as numerous contemporary artists worldwide. It is believed that Van Gogh owned 12 prints from Utagawa Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. In the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, there are also two direct copies of Hiroshige’s prints by the artist on display: Plum Garden at Kameido (1857), and Sudden Evening Shower over Shin Ohashi Bridge and Atake (1857) both from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
Hiroshige is thought to have produced around 5,000 designs for colour woodblock prints, as well as hundreds of paintings and dozens of illustrated books, in which he gave aesthetic pleasure and emotional solace to people at every level of society in Japan’s age of transformation. The great majority of the prints in this exhibition have not been on display to the public before, and several are believed to be the only surviving examples of their kind in the world.
From May until 7 September, British Museum, London, britishmuseum.org
On 15 May, there is an online lecture by curator Alfred Haft (free, reservation needed)
