Andō Hiroshige (歌川 広重/安藤 広重)

Ando Hiroshige was among the foremost designers of Japanese color woodblock prints of the ukiyo-e (Pictures of the Floating World) school of late Edo-period Japan (1610–1868). His early prints of prominent Kabuki actors and of famous courtesans of the 1820s documented and celebrated the activities and personalities of the Yoshiwara, the pleasure districts outside the city limits of the capital city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). But with his slightly older contemporary, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Hiroshige subsequently established himself as one of the leading landscape print artists of his generation. In his earliest cycle in this genre, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road (created in 1832–33 and published the following year), he forged a unique landscape style, combining a realistic portrayal of the topography that a traveler would encounter with an imaginative rendering of the daily activities that he might witness along the route. Hiroshige designed at least 26 different Tokaido sets and an even greater number of series devoted to urban views of Edo. Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road and 100 Famous Places in Edo (published between 1856 and 1857) are the masterpieces of this huge body of prints that successfully combines classical Japanese landscape painting styles (in Japanese, yamato-e) with ukiyo-e genre representations.