Art in Japan>Asian Art 100B.C.E.-1930>Prosperity of Edo: Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and other Landscape Works

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Prosperity of Edo: Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and other Landscape Works

by John McGee

Ando Hiroshige, People Gathering at the Coast of Takanawa to Wait for 
the Moon on the 26th Night, from the series "Celebrated Places in the 
Eastern Capital," 1831, color woodblock triptych, 36.8x76.6cm 
(Images courtesy Ota Memorial Museum of Art)

The only thing curving through Takanawa these days is JR tracks. What ukiyo-e printmaker Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) saw, however, was a sweeping waterfront lined with the red lanterns of yatai (food stalls). In a lively triptych of the former harbor, the Edo-born artist depicted townsfolk out for moon viewing. Bijin (beautiful women), musicians, and a guy wearing a full-length octopus costume mingle in front of a sushi shop while others sit on benches and look out at fishing boats and fireworks. 

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Edo, the Ota Memorial Museum organized a two-part exhibition of Hiroshige's work. The first part shows Edo from different periods of Hiroshige's career via two books, five paintings, and 85 woodblock prints. The second part features his late masterpiece, "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (118 prints by Hiroshige plus one by his student, Hiroshige II), made in the two years before his death and just ten years before the Meiji Restoration changed everything. 

Ando Hiroshige, Clothing Store at
Odemma-cho, from the series "One
Hundred Famous Views of Edo," 1858,
color woodblock print, 24.3x35.5cm

Publishers often reprised ukiyo-e series that sold well. Hiroshige's most famous set, "Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido," was produced in nearly 20 different editions. Such repetition forced innovation and creativity: In each series Hiroshige depicted the same scenes from different angles. The prints in this first part of the show, from "Celebrated Places in Edo," "Eight Sights in the Suburbs of Edo," and other series pre-dating "One Hundred Famous Views," capitalize on this.

Seen together, the multiple perspectives have an almost cinematic effect. Three versions of summer fireworks on the Sumida River, for example, focus on the Ryogoku Bridge: a close-up of its pilings and wooden slats seen from below, a medium shot of its span arching across the river at eye-level, and an overhead of people crossing the bridge to shops on either side. 

The books and paintings reveal less familiar sides of Hiroshige. His prints become poetry and guidebook illustrations in the small e-hon (picture books). His paintings demonstrate prowess in different styles—a brushy ink-on-paper image of a woman on a boat contrasts with light colored ink-on-silk paintings of Hakone and Enoshima. 

Some of the place names are familiar—Meguro, Akasaka, Shinagawa—but the images of them rarely are. Hiroshige's Haneda was a place to catch river ferries, not airplanes. The second half of the exhibition acknowledges this. Each of the "One Hundred Famous Views" prints  appear above one vintage black-and-white and one contemporary photograph of the same location.

Ando Hiroshige, Full Moon over Takanawa, from the series "Celebrated 
Places in the Eastern Capital," 1831, color woodblock print, 23.6x36.9cm 

At the risk of vastly oversimplifying 150 years of complex history, these before and after pictures show that Tokyo's same-same banalities were once Edo's discrete charms. Hiroshige's Edo was a diverse city of waterways, boats and bridges, of small hillocks rising above rice fields, streams and forests, of Mount Fuji looming on the horizon. Tokyo's citizens have paved the canals, corralled the hills in concrete and obscured Fuji behind bland high-rises. The bridge at Nihonbashi is now a freeway underpass. What meisho (famous places) would Hiroshige capture today? The Shuto Expressway? Hiroshige's blues and pinks inspired van Gogh, a painter worshipped by the Japanese. How ironic that by its 400th birthday, the Eastern Capital has gone gray. 

This exhibition was held Sep-Oct 2003 at Ukiyo-e Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan. 

©2006 John McGee

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