Hiroshige – The master of nature

by Aniko Horvath

One of Japan’s greatest ever artists, Utagawa Hiroshige, will be featured for the first time in Italy this spring when over 200 of his works on loan from the Honolulu Academy of Arts go on show at the Museo del Corso in Rome.

Hiroshige (1797-1858) is considered one of the most significant figures in the Japanese artistic tradition of ukiyo-e, meaning “pictures of the floating world”.
The Rome exhibition will include some of the artist’s most representative work, sublime embodiments of nature's awesome lyrical grace and some of the most unforgettable landscape images of all time.
Also on show will be a vast selection of Hiroshige’s prints dedicated to every aspect of life in his hometown of Edo (present day Tokyo) and The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido.

This series, which Hiroshige painted during a 500km-trip along the Tokaido Road, includes a variety of landscapes – shorelines, a snowy mountain range, lakes and villages – and is today widely regarded as his masterpiece.
Hiroshige was born in 1797 in the Yayosu barracks just east of Edo Castle, where his father was a hereditary retainer of the shogun whose duty was to work as an official within the fire-fighting organization that protected the Castle. When he was 13 both his parents were killed and the young boy inherited his father’s position at the Castle.

The salary was not much but sufficient to allow him to study art. At 15 he began studying under Utagawa Toyohiro, one of the foremost ukiyo-e artists of the time. Hiroshige's first genuinely original publications came six years later in 1818. His Eight Views of lake Biwa and Ten Famous Places in the Eastern Capital were moderately successful. But it was not until the publication of Hiroshige's Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (1831) that he attracted real public attention.

Hiroshige largely confined himself in his early work to common and popular ukiyo-e themes such as warriors, courtesans and actors. But it was his passion for nature and landscape painting which was to make his fortune. He contemplated his natural subjects with religious devotion and produced works of surprising harmony with improbable – but never unatural colours. Flowers, flocks of birds, mountains and rivers. His prints are almost photographic, capturing one moment in the flux of time: poetry in colour.
From the early 1830’s Hiroshige dedicated more and more time to travelling and to recording his travels in series of landscape paintings.

With The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (1833–1834), his success was assured.
Other hugely popular series followed, including The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido (1834-1842), Famous places in Kyoto (1834) and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-1858).
In 1856, Hiroshige “retired from the world,” becoming a Buddhist monk. He died aged 62 during the great Edo cholera epidemic of 1858.
Even during his lifetime Hiroshige’s paintings were acclaimed outside of Japan. In Europe, the Impressionists quickly became passionate admirers of his work. Many of Hiroshige’s prints inspired Impressionist tributes, particularly from Monet and Van Gogh.
Three of the Dutchman’s masterpieces were based on paintings by Hiroshige. Reproductions of Van Gogh’s “The Bridge in the rain”, “Flowering Plum Tree” and “Blossoming Pear Tree” are included in the exhibition.

Hiroshige – The master of nature
17 March – 7 June
Museo Fondazione Roma
Via del Corso, 320
Infoline 899.666.805 (toll service)
Opening hours:10.00 - 20.00
Closed Monday

Tickets
€ 9.00 (reduced: € 7.00)