Biography of Utagawa Hiroshige

Utagawa Hiroshige was born in 1797 in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, the son of Ando Gen-emon, a member of the firefighting brigade maintained by the Tokugawa Shogunate. Both his father and mother died when he was 13 years old and, following Japanese custom, he succeeded his father in the family post. However, as he was far more interested in painting than firefighting, he started studying the art of painting in 1811 as an apprentice of Utagawa Toyohiro, one of the most popular ukiyo-e artists of the day. In the following year, he was permitted to take his teacher's surname "Utagawa" and was also given the name "Hiroshige" which he later used to sign his work. At first he studied the painting of traditional schools such as Kano and Shijo and also Chinese painting of both the Southern and Northern schools, in addition to ukiyo-e.

During this period, he painted many portraits of beautiful women, actors, and warriors for single sheet prints and did work for book illustrations. When he was twenty-six years old (1823), he resigned from his job as firefighter and handed it over to his son.

Around 1830, he produced several series of landscape prints in which he demonstrated his genius as a landscape painter. The favorable response to the series encouraged him in his true calling as a landscape artist. In August of 1832, he made his first trip down the Tokaido Highway, joining an official procession sent by the Shogunate to Kyoto to make a gift of horses to the emperor. He was enormously impressed with the landscape of which he made many sketches as he passed through. Based on the sketches he made and the the impressions he received during the journey, he completed a series of fifty-five color prints; these were published from 1833 to 1834, and are popularly known by the title "The Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido".

For each print, Hiroshige did not confine himself to depicting the scenery along the highway only but he tried to capture travelers, packhorses and people appropriate to each different locality against a background full of natural beauty. This new style of landscape prints appealed to Japanese sentiment so much that they won public acclaim and brought him immediate fame.

After this success, the artist's energy was concentrated more on the making of landscape prints and he produced a series of masterpieces in succession. In Hiroshige's day, Edo with a population of over one million was the largest city in the world. As a landscape painter living in the huge city which was abundant in hills, slopes, lowland, rivers and bay, it was natural for him to draw pictures of the city scenery. He is said to have painted up to 1300 of such scenes. Among the series worthy of note is "One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo". In almost every print of the series, he tried to arrange some objects in the foreground in order to stress contrast with the background scenery. Three examples of prints from this series are No. 44: A Rough Sketch of Nihonbashi Itchome; No. 59: Ryogoku Bridge and Large Riverbank; and No. 79: Shinmei Shrine and Zojo-ji Temple at Shiba.

In 1858, while still working on this series, one of his masterpieces, he contracted cholera and died at the age of sixty-two.

From the Tokai Bank Foundation's "100 Famous Views of Edo