Japanese Art Exhibition: HIROSHIGE

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) is one of the most famous landscape artists in Japanese woodblock printing. His designs, which became known in the West during the late nineteenth century, are said to have influenced artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others. Eventually, his designs became so iconic that they even inspired some pattern design of Liberty.

In Japan there have been many depictions of landscape art; however it grew in popularity starting from the 1830s. Until the late 18
20s, the print scene was dominated by images of beauties and actors, but for a number of reasons things started to change.

First of all, the overall stability in the country, the reconstruction of the roads and the easing of restrictions resulted in a travel boom.
Along with this came the development of a tourist industry with cheap lodgings, full-service inns and teahouses proliferating all over the country. As a natural consequence travel guides (meishoki) started to appear containing useful information for travellers about famous places (meisho), historical events, important routes and so on.

Print publishers of course noticed this new interest in travel and the demand for related souvenirs and landscape prints increased from the late 1820s. It was in this context that Hiroshige rose to prominence as an artist of landscape woodblock prints.

Hiroshige produced a large number of landscape series, starting with The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido in 1832. From 1853 to 1856 he designed the The Famous Views of the (Sixty-odd) Provinces and in 1858 he produced Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Hiroshige designed his last great series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo from 1856 to 1858.

Our autumn exhibition (28th August – 10th November) is dedicated to a selection of the best original prints from the series mentioned above and offers a wide view on 19th century Japan’s most famous places, evocative sights and natural panoramas.