Utagawa Hiroshige Prints
1797–1858 · Japanese · Ukiyo-e
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo — rain over a bridge, plum gardens, snow and moonlight. Restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte paper.
351 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Utagawa Hiroshige
Utagawa Hiroshige, born Andō Tokutarō in Edo in 1797, trained under Utagawa Toyohiro and spent his early career on book illustrations and prints of actors and beauties. Around 1830 he turned to landscape, and The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, published in 1833 to 1834 after a journey along the coastal highway between Edo and Kyoto, made his name. He also contributed most of the designs to The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō and produced Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces in the 1850s. His last and most ambitious series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, was issued between 1856 and 1858 in a vertical format that let him push a bridge, a pine branch or a flight of birds into the foreground with the view opening behind it; Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Plum Garden at Kameido come from this set. He died in Edo in 1858. Van Gogh copied both of those prints in oil in 1887, and Hiroshige's rain, snow and twilight scenes shaped how European painters thought about weather and season. The series format means a single print is already a complete composition at domestic scale, which is why they frame so naturally.