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.
Utagawa Hiroshige's color palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each. Each swatch is an interpretation of the materials behind it, not a sample taken from a single work. How the palettes are made
Rain grey
Diluted sumi ink printed in fine diagonal lines over a bokashi grey wash — Hiroshige's signature rain effect. Each line is a separate impression.
Material: Sumi ink, fine-line rain printing over grey wash
RGB(106, 112, 120)
Twilight blue
Prussian blue in deep bokashi gradation — from near-black at the horizon to pale blue overhead. Hiroshige's twilight is the most atmospheric in ukiyo-e.
Material: Prussian blue, deep bokashi gradation
RGB(42, 72, 104)
Plum blossom red
Safflower red (beni) at medium concentration — the specific pink-red of plum blossoms, a key seasonal reference.
Material: Safflower red (beni), medium concentration
RGB(184, 48, 64)
Snow white (paper)
Unprinted paper as snow — Hiroshige's snow scenes use the paper itself, sometimes with embossing (karazuri) to create texture.
Material: Unprinted washi with karazuri embossing
RGB(234, 226, 216)
Leaf green
A mix of Prussian blue + gamboge yellow (aigami) for foliage. The specific green shifts with seasons — spring bright, summer deep, autumn golden.
Material: Prussian blue + gamboge (aigami) on washi
RGB(58, 120, 64)
Bridge brown
Persimmon tannin (kakishibu) — a traditional Japanese brown for woodwork and bridges. Warm, reddish, and historically accurate.
Material: Persimmon tannin (kakishibu) on washi
RGB(107, 74, 40)
Pigments used: Prussian blue
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.
By Pigmentoria · Published · Palette: interpretive reconstruction
Also in this era
Working at the same time
Elsewhere in the atlas, in other movements and other media, these were the hands at work during the same years.