Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige: The Man Who Printed the Weather

In 1833 a fledgling Edo publisher called Hōeidō began issuing a series of fifty-five woodblock prints of the post stations along the Tōkaidō, the great highway between Edo and Kyoto. Neither the publisher nor the artist was well known. *The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō* became the biggest print hit of its era and has never stopped being the best-remembered series in Japanese art. What made it new was not the road. It was the rain — sudden evening showers, torrential downpours, thin drizzle, each distinguished from the others, falling on ordinary travellers with their coats over their heads.

A Fire Warden's Son

He was born Andō Tokutarō in 1797 in the Yaesu district of Edo, into a samurai family of modest rank. His father held the post of fire warden for the Yayosu Quay area — a hereditary bureaucratic job with a great deal of idle time attached. Both parents died in 1809, and at twelve the boy inherited the position. The duties were light enough to leave him room to train as an artist, which is the small administrative accident on which the history of landscape printmaking turns.

Around 1811 he entered the studio of Utagawa Toyohiro and by 1812 was working under the name Hiroshige. For the next two decades he did what every Utagawa-school artist did: *bijin-ga*, prints of beautiful women, and portraits of kabuki actors. He was competent and entirely unremarkable at both.

The Road East

The turn came in 1832, when an official procession travelled the Tōkaidō and Hiroshige went with it. The sketches he brought back produced the Hōeidō series of 1833–34, and with it a new subject: not famous views as heraldic emblems, but the road itself, the weather over it, and the people trudging along it at particular hours of particular seasons.

How much of the journey he actually made is a live scholarly question. Some argue the authenticity of the scenes is palpable only as far as Hakone, and that the later stations were worked up from existing pictorial sources rather than direct observation. As one curator has put it, "you can feel the authenticity in the highway scenes up until Hakone, so some say he really walked this part. But there are few records, so it's just impossible to say for sure." The uncertainty is worth sitting with: the greatest travel pictures in Japanese art may be partly a studio reconstruction.

Technique

Hiroshige's reputation rests on effects that only the woodblock medium can produce, and which he pushed harder than anyone. *Bokashi* — graded washes of colour, achieved by wiping pigment across the block so that a sky darkens smoothly from horizon to zenith — is laborious, requiring multiple impressions in the same area, and it is the reason his dusks and snowfields feel atmospheric rather than diagrammatic. He also established the vertical *ōban* format as a landscape shape, which no one had thought a landscape needed.

His last great work, *One Hundred Famous Views of Edo* (1856–58), took the compositional risk that would detonate in Europe a decade later: enormous foreground objects — a tree trunk, a bird, a plunging eave, a human leg — cropped by the edge of the sheet and set against a deep, small distance. It creates depth by violent juxtaposition rather than by perspective, and it looks, to a modern eye, exactly like photography that had not yet been invented.

Poverty and Volume

He produced something in the region of eight thousand works. He was not rich. His income has been estimated at roughly twice a labourer's wage, and he died intestate and in debt. One of the most widely reproduced artists Japan has produced spent his career as a jobbing supplier to a commercial print industry, paid by the sheet.

He died in 1858 in the cholera epidemic that swept Edo. Scholars generally date the rapid decline of ukiyo-e from that year.

Why Hiroshige Is Called a Genius

The invention is specific and it is not draughtsmanship, which was merely very good. Hiroshige made weather, season and time of day into the subject of a picture rather than its setting. A station on a highway is a fixed thing; a squall crossing it at dusk in late autumn is an event, and he found a graphic language — flat colour fields, ruled diagonal lines of rain, graded skies — that could hold an event on a sheet of paper. Alongside that he developed the cropped-foreground composition that gave European painting a way out of Renaissance perspective. The evidence of the debt is direct: Van Gogh painted copies of his compositions outright, the French Impressionists including Monet collected his prints, and the Russian artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky named Hiroshige's unusual viewpoints as a constant source. Few artists have been so thoroughly absorbed by a foreign tradition.

The honest qualifications are three. First, authorship: a Japanese print is an industrial collaboration, and the gradations everyone admires were executed at the press by a printer following the artist's direction, over blocks cut by a specialist carver. The design is Hiroshige's; the object is not his alone. Second, the travel question — the man celebrated for having seen Japan may not have walked much of the route he is famous for. Third, volume: eight thousand designs cannot all be good, and much of his output is routine commercial work of no particular distinction, coasting on the formulas of his best series. He was a highly skilled professional in a mass medium who, perhaps two or three times, made something permanent. That is what most artists called great actually did.

Legacy

Hiroshige's afterlife has been larger than his life. The Tōkaidō and the *Hundred Famous Views* entered European studios in the 1860s and 1870s as cheap imported paper and came out again as Japonisme, remaking Van Gogh, Monet and the whole European habit of the asymmetrical, high-horizon, boldly cropped composition. The rain that falls across his prints is now one of the most widely recognised graphic marks in the world — a set of ruled parallel lines that no one had ever used to mean weather before he did. He left no fortune. He left the way we draw a downpour.

Achievements

• Notable work: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
• Notable work: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
• Notable work: Eight Views of Ōmi
• Notable work: Kōshū Nikki
• Movement: Utagawa school and Kasei culture