Andō Hiroshige (歌川広重/安藤広重)

Japanese, 1797 - 1858

BiographyUtagawa Hiroshige was an Edo-period, Japanese artist that worked during the peak of the ukiyo-e (“floating world”) style, the final phase of Japanese genre painting before the Meiji Restoration, and his works are exemplary of the thematic and stylistic components of this genre; his work came to be appreciated by artists and creatives around the world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His prolific œuvre covers a wide range of popular subjects, including depictions of flora and fauna, portraits, and tales of Japanese myth and Shinto religion. However, his forte as an artist are his captivating depictions of landscapes, showcasing themes of the sacred and the poetic that are found in nature; the majority of his work illustrated landscapes and seascapes of vistas found in Japan at various seasons and times of day.

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.

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