Who Was Hiroshige? The Ukiyo-e Master of the Tōkaidō Road Whose Prints Van Gogh Copied

Turning to landscapes

Only around 1829–1830 did Hiroshige begin to produce the landscapes he is famous for, along with bird-and-flower prints. The success of Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji strongly influenced his choice of subject, but Hiroshige's approach was more poetic and atmospheric than Hokusai's bolder, more formal prints. He relied on subtle color and on bokashi, the gradual shading of color across a print, which took a great deal of labor.

The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō

The Tōkaidō was the main road between the shōgun's capital, Edo, and the imperial capital, Kyoto, with 53 post stations along the way that offered stables, food and lodging. In 1832 Hiroshige traveled the road as part of an official delegation carrying horses that the shōgun presented each year to the imperial court. He sketched along the way, and back in Edo he produced a series of 55 prints: one for each station, plus the starting and ending points.

This Hōeidō edition (1833–1834) is his best-known work and the best-selling series of ukiyo-e prints ever made. Each print sold new for about 12 to 16 copper coins, roughly the price of a pair of straw sandals or a bowl of soup. The subject was so popular that Hiroshige went on to make some 30 different Tōkaidō series.

There is a twist. Scholars debate whether he really saw every station himself, because some designs closely follow an earlier illustrated guidebook from 1797; his view of Ishibe, for example, is almost identical to one in that book. Japanese scholarship today also treats the story of his official journey with some doubt.

"Hiroshige blue"

One of the things people notice first in his prints is the vivid blue of skies and water, which admirers in Europe and America came to call "Japan blue" or "Hiroshige blue". It is easy to mistake for traditional Japanese indigo, but it was in fact Prussian blue, a new pigment imported from Europe at the time. Because woodblock printing shows color more brightly than oil paint, this blue made a strong impression in the West and is said to have influenced the Impressionists and Art Nouveau artists, helping spark the fashion for Japonisme.

One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

In 1856 Hiroshige "retired from the world" and became a Buddhist monk, and in the same year he began his last great series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The series of 119 prints was published in installments from 1856 to 1859; his pupil Hiroshige II completed it after his death, and it was hugely popular and much reprinted.

Unlike the horizontal Tōkaidō prints, these are in a vertical format. Hiroshige often placed a large object, person or animal, or part of one, right in the foreground, a device taken from Western art to add depth. According to one story, the series was paid for in advance by a wealthy Buddhist priest who was in love with the publisher's daughter.

Why did Van Gogh copy Hiroshige?

Van Gogh was perhaps the European painter most influenced by Japanese art. He collected several hundred Japanese prints, twelve of them by Hiroshige. In the summer of 1887 he made painted copies of three Japanese prints, two of them Hiroshige's: Plum Garden in Kameido and Sudden Shower over the Ōhashi Bridge at Atake, both from his own collection. Both come from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

Copying them changed his painting. Afterwards he used colors without mixing, used black more boldly, and gave new strength to outlines, while the Japanese contrast between near and far, which Hiroshige used so well, shaped his sense of space. Hiroshige's influence also reached James McNeill Whistler, the Russian art movement Mir iskusstva and, much later, comics such as The Adventures of Tintin.

Hiroshige's death and legacy

Hiroshige died in 1858, aged 62, during the great cholera epidemic in Edo. He is generally said to have caught cholera himself, though some accounts treat the cause of death as unknown. Despite producing over 8,000 works, he was never wealthy. His fee per series was low, his income was about twice a day laborer's wage, and his will left instructions for paying his debts.

For collectors, his death marks the start of the rapid decline of ukiyo-e, especially after the Westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. His pupils carried on the name as Hiroshige II and Hiroshige III, but neither reached their master's level of success.

Learn English with Hiroshige

Expression	Meaning	Example
on the road	traveling	Hiroshige sketched while he was on the road.
set the scene	give the background or mood	The rain in his prints sets the scene.
catch someone's eye	attract attention	The bright blue sky catches your eye.
take a leaf out of someone's book	copy someone's good example	Van Gogh took a leaf out of Hiroshige's book.
a household name	a very famous person or thing	Hiroshige became a household name in Edo.

Practice: Describe a street or road you know well in three sentences, as if you were planning a Hiroshige print. Use "set the scene" and "catch someone's eye".