Utagawa Hiroshige

Hiroshige was born in Edo into a family of fire wardens and inherited his father's post as a boy, holding it while he trained under Utagawa Toyohiro. He was in his mid-thirties before the work that made his name — The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, drawn from a journey along the highway between Edo and Kyoto.

What separates him from the rest of the Utagawa school is weather. Where his contemporaries drew places, Hiroshige drew conditions: rain coming down in ruled diagonal lines, snow flattening a village, a night so dark the composition is carried by a single lit window. The rain prints in particular are built from techniques the block-cutters had to be pushed to achieve.

He died in the cholera epidemic that swept Edo in 1858, shortly after finishing One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Within thirty years his prints were in Paris, where Van Gogh copied two of them in oil and Whistler took the flattened space and the high horizon and made something else of them entirely.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗