Utagawa Hiroshige
1797–1858Japanese · Ukiyo-e (Floating World) 1680–1880
Van Gogh copied two of his prints in oil, stroke for stroke, and wrote to his brother that Japanese art was something one should study the way one studies a religion. Hiroshige made the landscape of a road into a national self-portrait.
Formation
Born into a minor samurai family with a hereditary post in the Edo fire service, which he inherited at twelve and later passed on so he could paint. He trained under Utagawa Toyohiro and worked in the standard genres before turning to landscape. The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, published from 1833, followed a journey along the highway between Edo and Kyoto and was an immediate popular success — a form of travel imagery for an audience largely forbidden to travel freely.
Technique
The same collaborative woodblock system as Hokusai, but used toward a completely different end. Where Hokusai composes with dramatic geometry, Hiroshige builds atmosphere: rain rendered as fine parallel scored lines cut into the block, snow as unprinted paper, mist as a graded band produced by the printer wiping ink from the block before each impression. The bokashi gradation technique is central to him and is a printer's skill, applied fresh to every single sheet, which means no two impressions are identical.
The palette
Restrained and atmospheric, built on Prussian blue and a narrow set of companions: indigo, safflower pink, yellow ochre, grey and black, with graded transitions doing the work that additional colours would otherwise do. His skies frequently carry two or three gradations at once — a dark band at the top, clear in the middle, warm at the horizon — which is a printing effect and not a drawn one. The late One Hundred Famous Views of Edo pushes the format into unusual vertical compositions with strong foreground cropping.
Legacy
Along with Hokusai he is the ukiyo-e artist through whom Japonisme reached Europe. Van Gogh's painted copies of two Hiroshige prints, complete with invented Japanese characters in the borders, are among the most direct pieces of evidence for the transmission. The rain of Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge — diagonal lines across the whole surface — is one of the most quoted devices in graphic art.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Prussian blue