Just under 200 years ago, a revolution shook Japan’s art world. It went on to hit Europe like a typhoon. Until the 1830s, the woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e — pictures of the “floating world” of pleasure and entertainment — had mainly portrayed characters from this world, particularly kabuki actors and beautiful women.
But then, in late 1830, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) produced his “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” landscape series. Its enormous success inspired Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) — a moderately successful kabuki illustrator — to turn to landscape as well, producing “Famous Places in the Eastern Capital” in 1831. A year later, he followed up with “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido.” In these two years, Hokusai and Hiroshige transformed the world of ukiyo-e forever, leaving behind the floating world in favor of mesmerizing landscapes that depicted mountains, valleys, villages, rivers and bridges. Over the next 16 years, Hiroshige produced several more highly successful series of landscape prints, culminating in “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” — the largest collection of his career.
Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Definitive Collector's Edition, by Andreas Marks. 320 pages, TUTTLE PUBLISHING, Nonfiction.