Fire warden who mapped Japan's roads in woodblock weather
Utagawa Hiroshige, born Ando Tokutaro in 1797 and dead 12 October 1858, became ukiyo-e's last great landscape master. Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo traded courtesans for rain, mist, and highway inns that later intoxicated Van Gogh's generation.
Hiroshige came from samurai stock, born in 1797 at Yayosu Quay in Edo, today's Tokyo. His grandfather taught archery, and his father had been adopted into the Ando family and inherited its post as fire warden for the quay district. Both parents died in 1809, and before he went, his father handed the fire-warden job to his twelve-year-old son. Guarding Edo Castle against fire left the boy plenty of spare time, which he spent drawing; he first studied Kano-style painting with Okajima Rinsai, a neighbour in the barracks.
Rejected by the overbooked master Toyokuni, he trained instead in the Utagawa school under Toyohiro, producing book illustrations and prints of beauties and kabuki actors. He passed the fire-warden post to his son in 1823 and turned down the chance to succeed Toyohiro in 1828. Only in 1829 to 1830 did landscapes take over, spurred partly by Hokusai's recently published Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, though his own manner was gentler and more atmospheric.
His low samurai rank earned him a place in an official procession to Kyoto in 1832, and the sketches he made along the highway became The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. His first wife once sold clothes and hair combs to pay for such trips; after she died in 1838 he married Oyasu, sixteen years younger. He contributed forty-six of the seventy prints in the Kisokaido series shared with Keisai Eisen, and from about 1848 made 118 sheets for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a project funded in advance by a wealthy priest smitten with the publisher's daughter.
Despite more than 8,000 works, he was never well off, earning roughly twice a labourer's wage, and his will arranged to settle his debts. He became a Buddhist monk in 1856 and died at 62 during Edo's cholera epidemic of 1858. After him, ukiyo-e declined quickly, but Manet and Monet studied his compositions and Van Gogh copied some of his prints.
Source: Hiroshige
