This is a wonderfully beautiful show of pure visual, intellectual and aesthetic pleasure.
A leading US collector of Hiroshige’s work, Mr Alan Medaugh, has recently gifted 35 prints by Hiroshige to the American Friends of the British Museum and loaned a further 82 works, and it’s these – plus additions from the British Museum’s own collection and the more modern works in the final section –which make up the contents of this fabulous exhibition. Thank you very much indeed Mr Medaugh!
Ferry on the Fuji River, Suruga Province from Famous Places in Japan c. 1832 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print © The Trustees of the British Museum
Hence this exhibition, the first on Hiroshige to be held in London for quarter of a century, and the first ever to be held at the British Museum. The great majority of the prints in the exhibition have never been displayed before, and several are believed to be the only surviving examples of their kind in the world.
The title has two elements, Hiroshige, and the open road, and thereafter is divided into themes or topics. I’ll address them one by one.
Preliminary note
This review relies more than usual on the curators’ own words, which can be found in the large print guide i.e. the complete wall labels, for the exhibition. This is because it is a more than usually scholarly and academic exhibition. At exhibitions of Giuseppe Penone or even Arpita Singh, I can start from my knowledge of western art and the traditions those artists invoke and movements they work within, to generate my own thoughts about the design and style and themes of their work.
This is not that kind of exhibition. It is highly educational about a subject and style remote from most of us. It is a display of immense scholarship which digs into levels of detail – for example about different types of Japanese nature painting, or the subtle influence of Chinese schools of landscape painting on Japanese art – which you and I are just not informed about.
Did you know that a yūjo is the name for a Japanese sex worker or courtesan or that bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) were one of Hiroshige’s most popular print subjects? Could you distinguish between Hiroshige’s style and the compositionally bolder style of the Kyoto Maruyama-Shijō school? Or that the tanzaku is the name for the tall, narrow format of a strip of paper used to record poems?
No. Me neither. This is a very information-dense exhibition which is why to write a meaningful review I need to repeat a lot of the scholarly commentary which informs the show.
Hiroshige
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858) was one of Japan’s most prolific and popular artists. People at every level of society embraced his calm, lyrical depictions of daily life, nature and the rural landscape. The work of modern and contemporary artists across Europe, the US and Japan reveals his lasting influence.
Born into a low-ranking samurai family in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Hiroshige was orphaned at the age of 12 and inherited his father’s title of fire warden. A superior in the fire department taught him to paint in the Kano school style. By the 1830s he was focusing on what were to become his best-known subjects: tranquil views of famous places, panoramic views of city life, and beautiful depictions of the natural world. Over time he became renowned for his innovative compositions and subtle use of graded ink tones (bokashi).
Hiroshige’s earliest series depict scenes in and around his home city of Edo, such as ‘Famous Places in the Eastern Capital’ and ‘Eight Views of the Eastern Capital’. They depict well-known sights around Edo Bay.
Pleasure Boats at Ryōgoku in the Eastern Capital, 1832-4 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh. Photography by Matsuba Ryōko
Following a career spanning more than four decades, Hiroshige died on the 12 October 1858, perhaps the victim of a cholera epidemic then afflicting Edo.
Avoiding politics
Hiroshige lived at the end of the Edo period (1615 to 1868), when a samurai government ruled Japan from the city of Edo. It was a time of urban growth, but also of famine, social crisis and foreign military incursions. Hiroshige, however, avoided depicting turmoil in his art. On the contrary it was his realistic but beautifully stylised landscapes that earned him greatest fame in his lifetime and continue to win admiration today.
The open road
The samurai government of Japan had banned foreign travel since the 1630s but by Hiroshige’s time there was a growing interest in domestic journeys. Samurai lords with hundreds of attendants made their way to Edo to pay their respects to the shogun. Others set off on business, pilgrimage and sightseeing trips, independently or in organised groups.
Inspired by his own explorations, and by East Asian painting traditions and guidebooks, Hiroshige created landscape pictures that were visually inviting and filled with human interest. They offered an imaginative escape for those unable to travel. As the man himself wrote:
[My] drawings present completely true-to-life landscapes to give people just a moment of pleasure without the inconvenience of a long journey.
Landscapes and meisho (famous places) were a safe subject for publishers during the early 1840s, a period of severe censorship.
Evening View of the Eight Scenic Spots of Kanazawa in Musashi Province, 1857 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh
The Eastern Coast Road
But the exhibition focuses on a couple of famous roads in particular. The 500-kilometre-long Tōkaidō (Eastern Coast Road) connected Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the east with Kyoto, the emperor’s capital, in the west. It was the most travelled highway in Japan. There’s a big map of the route of the road(s) on the wall which, like a numpty, I forgot to take a photo of.
The fifty-three post stations along its route provided travellers with places to rest and stock up on supplies. Accommodation ranged from simple guest houses to luxury inns reserved for daimyō (samurai lords). From around 1833 until the end of his life, Hiroshige designed more than 20 series of prints on the Tōkaidō, about 700 works in total.
Nihonbashi, ‘Morning Scene’, from the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō, c. 1833-35 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print © The Trustees of the British Museum
The Central Mountain Road
Later in the exhibition there’s a work from a series depicting a different rout. The Kisokaidō (Kiso highway, also called the Nakasendō or Central Mountain Road) took travellers on a difficult journey through the mountain ranges north-west of Edo, today called the Japanese Alps. It crossed some of Japan’s most awe-inspiring scenery. Steep passes and heart-stopping suspension bridges made it an adventurous route through sixty-nine stations connecting Kyoto and Edo.
Hiroshige depicted the highway in only one major series, which he took over from another artist. It’s represented by a really evocative depiction of a tiny road winding among snow-covered mountains.
Wherever he travelled Hiroshige took a sketchbook which he packed with sketches of different landscapes, and several of them are on display here.
Prolificness
Mention of the 700 works raises a key fact about Hiroshige which is his astonishing prolificness. Hiroshige was commissioned by publishers. The publishers published works in series. If a series was popular, more would be commissioned.
The point of these colour woodblock prints is they were designed to be cheap, affordable, and popular, in subject matter and format. Late in the show they tell us about scientific forensic work which has been done on Hiroshige’s surviving woodblocks and so we think that his most popular designs may have been printed up to 15,000 times before the woodblocks wore down completely.
Throughout his life Hiroshige returned to depictions of Edo, capital of the Tokugawa government during the Edo period (1615 to 1868). He did so in more than 150 print series, including ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ which covered every neighbourhood, including areas that were not especially famous.
The mass-production of these colour woodblock prints during the Edo period met the demand from an expanding audience for inexpensive art and meant that ordinary people could buy beautifully made but disposable prints for a few pennies.
Print production began with the publisher, who hired the artist, block cutter and printer. Hiroshige worked for around 90 publishers! In a competitive business environment Japanese publishers needed to cultivate as wide an audience as possible. They may have issued variant designs of a single work as a way of appealing to different tastes, which explains the samples here of the same basic design (of a pheasant, say) being reversioned to appear as if in spring, summer and winter, by changing details of the design (adding snow for winter etc).
All this explains why the complete catalogue of Hiroshige’s work amounts to some 5,000 designs for colour woodblock prints, as well as hundreds of paintings and dozens of illustrated books.
Uchiwa (fans)
In Edo-period Japan, warm weather brought a demand for inexpensive, hand-held fans that people could use and enjoy for a season and then discard. A popular type was the uchiwa, an oval fan on fixed ribs with a handle. Unlike folding fans (ōgi), uchiwa are non-collapsible and so allow woodblock prints to be pasted onto their rigid bamboo frame. Uchiwa fan prints were disposable and only a few examples of each design survive.
Several examples are here along with depictions of them in works by Hiroshige and contemporaries, with a copy of a book of stories based on different types of fan by Hishikawa Moronobu.
Modern specialists in ukiyo-e (Edo-period popular prints) have counted every known uchiwa design by Hiroshige and concluded that he produced well over 500, far more than any other artist. The subjects range from rustic and urban scenes to still life.
The exhibition doesn’t have any fans decorated by him, but examples of his works which depict fan-bearing geishas, along with a very big portrait-shaped depiction of a young geisha with an older woman carrying different types of fan, by Kitagawa Tsukimaro.
Kachō hanga (prints of birds and flowers)
Hiroshige’s depictions of nature, especially his kachō hanga (prints of birds and flowers), show his intuitive bond with the natural world. Many include a Japanese or Chinese poem inscribed in flowing calligraphy, reflecting the connection between nature and poetry in Japanese culture and the high level of literacy at the time. Hiroshige’s kachō hanga contributed to a sudden flourishing of the genre in Japan from the 1830s and furthered the artist’s popularity.
Crane and asters, Three geese and full moon, Pheasant and chrysanthemums by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock prints. Gift from the collection of Alan Medaugh to the American Friends of the British Museum Centre © Alan Medaugh. Photograph by Matsuba Ryōko
This section was, for me, the most appealing. There are lots of works depicting a wide range of birds, plants and trees, including wonderful depictions of an owl, mandarin duck, cuckoo, parakeet, cockerel, Eurasian jay, heron, wagtail, kingfisher, falcon, pheasant, tit, oriole, you get the picture.
Also, there’s sound. The curators commissioned a 25-minute long audio track combining the sound of streams, waterfalls, rainfall and animals, including birds and crickets.
One of the most striking images is from late in his career when he experimented with putting objects in the foreground so that they dominate the image, and did so with an enormous carp.
An enormous black carp appears to leap into the air high above the samurai neighbourhood of Surugadai in Edo. In popular East Asian belief, if a carp reaches the top of a waterfall it turns into a dragon, symbolising hard work leading to success. People in Edo displayed koi-nobori (carp banners) like this during the Boys’ Day Festival (5th day of the 5th month, now called Children’s Day).
Bijin
After his attention shifted to landscapes in the early 1830s, Hiroshige did not return to depicting bijin (beautiful women) for more than a decade. As government censorship restrictions started to ease in the late 1840s, he began designing bijin triptychs, depicting women beautifully dressed in kimonos which are depicting in loving and yet always stylised detail.
Cherry Blossoms on a Moonless Night along the Sumida River (1847-8) by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print triptych. Gift from the collection of Alan Medaugh to the American Friends of the British Museum © Alan Medaugh. Photograph by Matsuba Ryōko
Videos and tools
The exhibition includes three or four videos showing modern craftsmen demonstrating the techniques of woodcarving, and painting, which Hiroshige used in his prints.
- the artist Hiroko Imada demonstrates the bokashi (gradation) woodblock printing technique – this is an effect achieved in the printing process by the controlled application of ink to the woodblock
- extracts from a film by the artist Kawase Hasui (1883–1957) showing him cutting the omohan or key block
- Capucine Korenberg, scientist at the British Museum, discusses her work on the different versions of Hiroshige’s Plum Garden at Kameido prints
And, of course, display cases containing tools of the trade, woodblock-cutting tools like a mallet and chisel, an omohan or key or outline block, a baren or printer’s pad, and explaining the techniques
- kimedashi or relief printing
- musenzuri or contourless printing
- kasanezuri or over-printing
Hiroshige’s influence in the West
In the late nineteenth century there was a vogue in Europe and America for Japanese prints, fashions and designs on vases, tea services etc which goes under the name of Japonisme. It was fed by the opening up of Japan to trade in the 1850s which led to the rapid dissemination of Japanese products in the West.
The exhibition has a modest section describing some highlights of this. Most notable are two big names from the end of the century, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeil Whistler.
In a fascinating little section, we are shown an original Hiroshige print – The Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 – and told that Vincent van Gogh bought a copy around 1887 and then meticulously traced it onto a numbered grid which he used to enlarge the composition to scale onto the canvas for his oil copy, with van Gogh’s numbered grid placed net to it.
In fact Van Gogh and his brother Theo purchased over 400 Japanese colour woodblock prints and Vincent copied a number of them. Further along the wall is a large-scale sketch of ‘The Countryside along the Shore of the Rhône’ in which he consciously tried to adopt the Japanese approach to landscape, seeking harmony of composition over photographic realism.
The Whistler connection is less dramatic: American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow published a book which included examples of Hiroshige prints next to reproductions of works by Whistler to show the influence, namely abandoning the quest for photographic realism in an effort to create atmospheric compositions.
A bit more tenuously there’s a not very good 1895 print by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec titled The Passenger in 54 which may, or may not, have been influenced by Hiroshige’s strategy of placing the subject in the foreground so as to eclipse the background setting. This is the kind of thing we’re referring to where, pretty obviously, the tree is the focal point of the image, with the people in the background utterly eclipsed.
The Plum Garden at Kameido from 100 Famous Views of Edo, 1857 by Utagawa Hiroshige. Colour-woodblock print. Collection of Alan Medaugh © Alan Medaugh. Photography by Matsuba Ryōko
Modern homages
This final section brings together a dozen or so artworks by contemporary artists which pay homage one way or another to Hiroshige’s achievement. They include:
- Julian Opie who produced a set of lenticular prints of the landscape around Mount Fuji (2009)
- Koya Abe who digitally altered Hiroshige’s print Seba to convey the destruction caused by the Great Tōhoku Earthquake on 11 March 2011
- Emily Allchurch who has digitally collaged hundreds of her photographs of Japan to create new interpretations of Hiroshige in Tokyo Story
- Noda Tetsuya who noticed the similarity between the view from Tate Modern looking down on the Thames and Millennium Bridge and Hiroshige’s print, ‘Sudden Shower over Ōhashi and Atake’ and so did a Hiroshige-style treatment of the London view, titled Diary: Feb. 23rd
Thoughts
Magic. ‘Luxury, peace, and pleasure’ Japanese style. Go and see it.
Related links
- Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road continues at the British Museum until 7 September 2025
- Large print guide i.e. all the wall captions
Books & Boots 