Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858)
Utagawa Hiroshige, whose original name was Ando Hiroshige, was born into the household of a lower-ranking samurai in the service of the Tokugawa military government, but as a young man he apprenticed himself to the painter Utagawa Toyohiro and began a career as an ukiyoe artist. What secured his reputation as a master of the landscape genre of ukiyoe was the publication by the Hoeido printing house of his "Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido" in 1833. This series of prints shows scenes along the Tokaido road (which had 53 lodging stops between Edo and Kyoto), incorporating depictions of landscapes in different seasons and climatic conditions with scenes of travelers and people who lived along the way.
With its rich evocations of the sensual pleasures of travel, this series coincided with the "travel boom" of the time, and an astoundingly large number of copies were printed. In this series, Hiroshige liberally employs a dark indigo color produced from chemical dyes that had only recently come into use, and these techniques, skillfully used to represent expanses of sky and of water surfaces, are frequently employed in his later works as well. However, the most remarkable characteristic of his work is the "lyrical" way in which he represented the overall spirit of his landscapes. In addition to landscapes, he has also left some excellent works in the flower-and-bird genre.
