34 Facts About Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige, born Ando Tokutaro, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.

Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

For scholars and collectors, Hiroshige's death marked the beginning of a rapid decline in the ukiyo-e genre, especially in the face of the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Hiroshige's work came to have a marked influence on western European painting towards the close of the 19th century as a part of the trend in Japonism.

Hiroshige was born in 1797 in the Yayosu Quay section of the Yaesu area in Edo.

Hiroshige was of a samurai background, and is the great-grandson of Tanaka Tokuemon, who held a position of power under the Tsugaru clan in the northern province of Mutsu.

Hiroshige's grandfather, Mitsuemon, was an archery instructor who worked under the name Sairyuken.

Hiroshige went through several name changes as a youth: Juemon, Tokube, and Tetsuzo.

Hiroshige had three sisters, one of whom died when he was three.

Hiroshige's mother died in early 1809, and his father followed later in the year, but not before handing his fire warden duties to his twelve-year-old son.

Hiroshige was charged with prevention of fires at Edo Castle, a duty that left him much leisure time.

Hiroshige sought the tutelage of Toyokuni of the Utagawa school, but Toyokuni had too many pupils to make room for him.

Hiroshige studied the techniques of the well-established Kano school, the nanga whose tradition began with the Chinese Southern School, and the realistic Shijo school, and likely the linear perspective techniques of Western art and uki-e.

Hiroshige declined an offer to succeed Toyohiro upon the master's death in 1828.

Hiroshige created an increasing number of bird and flower prints about this time.

Hiroshige sketched the scenery along the way, and when he returned to Edo he produced the series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, which contains some of his best-known prints.

Hiroshige built on the series' success by following it with others, such as the Illustrated Places of Naniwa, Famous Places of Kyoto, another Eight Views of Omi.

Hiroshige died in October 1838, and Hiroshige remarried to Oyasu, sixteen years his junior, daughter of a farmer named Kaemon from Totomi Province.

Around 1838 Hiroshige produced two series entitled Eight Views of the Edo Environs, each print accompanied by a humorous kyoka poem.

The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido saw print between about 1835 and 1842, a joint production with Keisai Eisen, of which Hiroshige's share was forty-six of the seventy prints.

Hiroshige produced 118 sheets for the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo over the last decade of his life, beginning about 1848.

Hiroshige II was a young print artist, Chinpei Suzuki, who married Hiroshige's daughter, Otatsu.

Hiroshige never lived in financial comfort, even in old age.

In 1856, Hiroshige "retired from the world," becoming a Buddhist monk; this was the year he began his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

Hiroshige died aged 62 during the great Edo cholera epidemic of 1858 and was buried in a Zen Buddhist temple in Asakusa.

Hiroshige's will left instructions for the payment of his debts.

Hiroshige largely confined himself in his early work to common ukiyo-e themes such as women and actors.

Hiroshige went on to produce more than 2000 different prints of Edo and post stations Tokaido, as well as series such as The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido and his own Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Hiroshige dominated landscape printmaking with his unique brand of intimate, almost small-scale works compared against the older traditions of landscape painting descended from Chinese landscape painters such as Sesshu.

Hiroshige pioneered the use of the vertical format in landscape printing in his series Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces.

Hiroshige was a member of the Utagawa school, along with Kunisada and Kuniyoshi.

In terms of style, Hiroshige is especially noted for using unusual vantage points, seasonal allusions, and striking colors.

Hiroshige's style influenced the Mir iskusstva, a 20th-century Russian art movement in which Ivan Bilibin and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky were major artists.

Hiroshige was regarded by Louis Gonse, director of the influential Gazette des Beaux-Arts and author of the two volume L'Art Japonais in 1883, as the greatest painter of landscapes of the 19th century.