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| Andō Hiroshige | |
|---|---|
| Name | Andō Hiroshige |
| Caption | Self-portrait |
| Birth date | 1797 |
| Birth place | Edo |
| Death date | 1858 |
| Nationality | Japan |
| Occupation | Ukiyo-e printmaker |
Andō Hiroshige was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist renowned for his landscape prints and poetic depictions of travel, weather, and seasonal change. He became one of the last great masters of the ukiyo-e tradition and influenced contemporaries and later artists across Europe and North America. His works record routes, ports, and temples along famous roads and waterways and helped codify pictorial conventions for landscape in the late Edo period.
Born in 1797 in Edo into a merchant family, he was baptized with the given name Tokutarō and later took the art name that would be rendered in print catalogues. He apprenticed to a woodblock carver and studied under the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Toyohiro of the Utagawa school, where he learned compositional approaches used by colleagues such as Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Hiroshige II, and Utagawa Hiroshige III. Early influences also included older figures from the print world like Katsushika Hokusai, Torii Kiyonaga, and Katsukawa Shunshō, as well as painters and print designers associated with the Maruyama school and Nanga literati painting.
His style is characterized by economical line, bold cropping, and atmospheric perspective achieved through innovative uses of color and printing techniques such as aizuri-e (blue prints), bokashi (gradation), and nishiki-e (brocade pictures). He drew on compositional devices from landscape painting traditions like Chinese painting models transmitted via Kano school channels and contemporaneous print practices exemplified by Hishikawa Moronobu and Okumura Masanobu. Hiroshige employed collaboration among designers, carvers, printers and publishers such as Tsutaya Jūzaburō and Yamamoto Kinsuke to realize work in series, relying on block carvers associated with firms in the Tokiwadani and Nihonbashi neighborhoods of Edo.
His most celebrated series include the multivolume travel albums and ukiyo-e sets such as "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō" (Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi), "Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō" (Kisokaidō Rokujūkyū-tsugi), and "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (Meisho Edo Hyakkei). He also produced thematic albums like "Ten Famous Views in the Eastern Capital", "Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces" (Rokujūyo Kon), and numerous kacho-e prints depicting birds and flowers that recall earlier floral studies by designers linked to Shijō school. Publishers who issued these series included Honsei, Kadokawa, and Kobayashi Tetsujirō-associated houses, and subjects ranged from stations along the Tōkaidō road and Nakasendō to scenes at Mount Fuji, Yokohama, Hakone, Shinagawa, and Nihonbashi.
His compositional innovations influenced contemporaries within the Utagawa school and later printmakers such as Toyohara Chikanobu, Yoshitoshi, and followers who adopted his cropping and vantage points. Western artists including Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, James McNeill Whistler, and Édouard Manet collected and emulated aspects of his color, perspective, and series format, while critics and historians such as Ernest Fenollosa and Laurence Binyon promoted his work during Japonisme. Institutions that exhibited and acquired his prints include the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée d'Orsay, helping to cement his influence on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Art Nouveau design.
From the mid-19th century, Hiroshige's prints arrived in ports like Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Nagasaki Prefecture and entered trade networks that reached London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York City, and St. Petersburg. Collectors, dealers, and artists—figures such as William Anderson, Samuel Bing, and Arthur Wesley Dow—disseminated prints and writings that shaped Western perceptions of Japanese aesthetics. Exhibitions at venues like the Great Exhibition (1851), galleries in Paris, and later world fairs introduced his work to a broad public and fed into decorative arts movements including Arts and Crafts movement and Japonisme in European capitals.
In later decades he continued to produce new series, rework earlier subjects, and supervise workshop productions through the 1850s, often commissioning prints that catered to tourist markets and local patrons in Edo and along travel routes. Financial pressures and changing market conditions affected his output, and he died in 1858 in Edo, leaving a large corpus of prints, illustrated books, and designs that would be reissued, copied, and adapted by pupils and publishers for generations.
Category:Ukiyo-e artists Category:Japanese printmakers Category:Artists from Edo