Hiroshige
I leave my brush in the East,
Utagawa Hiroshige
And set forth on my journey.
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.
Although the importance of his work makes Hokusai the artist who deserves the highest place among 19th century Japanese printmakers, it was Utagawa Hiroshige who brought this genre to its highest expression. Compared to Hokusai’s works, in Hiroshige’s prints “movement and action present a greater calm, more subtlety, which endows his landscapes with a poetic content” (Historia Universal de la Pintura, Espasa Calpe, Volume VIII, 1997). For David Almazán Tomás and Elena Barlés Báguena (“Hiroshige, master of the landscape of Japanese engraving”), Hiroshige “goes a step further and manages to capture with immediacy the instantaneous impressions of landscapes in the fluctuating passage of the seasons and the changing moments of the day“. Hiroshige’s death in 1858 marked the definitive decline of the ukiyo-e school.
Image: Utagawa Kunisada: “Portrait of Hiroshige”. Polychrome woodblock print, 36.2 x 24.4 cm.
Hiroshige, whose real name was Andō Tokutarō, was born in Edo (now Tokyo) in the last years of the eighteenth century. He showed an early attraction to painting, so as a child he entered the workshop of the artist Utagawa Toyohiro. Although we know that at the age of fifteen he was already allowed to sign his own works, there is little information about his early career. When his master died in 1828, Hiroshige refused to succeed him, keeping his pseudonym instead of changing it to Toyohiro II.
It is then that the artist’s mature period begins. He painted his “Eight Views of Ōmi” series, which serves as a prologue to his “The Fifty-three Seasons of Tōkaidō“, one of the most important works of the ukiyo-e school. Inspired by Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” series, Hiroshige’s series is notable for the variety of its scenes, which range from grandiose landscapes with no human presence (“10th Station: Hakone, high rocks by a lake”) to urban landscapes (“35th Station: Goyu”) including almost costumbrist scenes in which the artist strives to depict atmospheric effects (“Station 45 : Shōno. Travelers surprised by a sudden rain”).
Utagawa Hiroshige: “10th station: Hakone, high rocks by a lake”, from the series “The Fifty-three Seasons of Tōkaidō”. Woodblock print, 1833-34. 24.1 x 35.9 cm ·· Utagawa Hiroshige: “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake”, from the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”. Woodblock print, 1857-59. 37 x 25 cm.
But while “The Fifty-three Seasons of Tōkaidō” is a major series, Hiroshige’s true masterpiece, and the pinnacle of ukiyo-e along with the aforementioned series by Hokusai, is “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” a series of 119 works created between 1856 and 1858, the printing of which would not be completed until after the artist’s death. In vertical format, Hiroshige depicted life and landscapes in Edo. The most celebrated work in the series, “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake” was chosen by theartwolf in 2006 as one of the 50 masterpieces of painting.
Undoubtedly inspired by Hokusai’s eponymous series, Hiroshige painted “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji“, a series he published in two parts, one in horizontal and one in vertical format. He died at the age of 62, victim of a cholera outbreak. His works, perhaps even more than those of Hokusai, had a colossal influence on the painting of Vincent van Gogh, who not only included them as background for his works, but also copied several of the Japanese master’s paintings, such as the aforementioned “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake“.
G. Fernández · theartwolf.com
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