Hiroshige: New Perspectives on Edo Japan

Hiroshige: New Perspectives on Edo Japan is a special exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, Tokyo, devoted to the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige. Ukiyo-e are the woodblock prints and paintings of everyday life and popular subjects made in the Edo period. The exhibition marks the museum's acquisition of 1,025 prints from the collection of Uchiyama Susumu. It is the first full-scale Hiroshige exhibition the museum has held.

Hiroshige (1797-1858) worked in the late Edo period. He made his name with landscapes that carry the feeling of the changing seasons and with brightly colored pictures of birds and flowers. In his landscapes, which became his trademark, he took scenes from across Japan and caught changes in weather and time of day, along with the people who lived there, in carefully built compositions. His style, easy to enjoy but fresh, won over the people of Edo.

The exhibition runs in three parts, and the works on view change completely each time. Each part is built around one of his three major series: The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kiso Road and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Every print of each series is shown, together with other landscapes and bird-and-flower prints. The museum describes the chance to see all three series in full as without precedent in Japan or abroad. A corner with ultra-high-definition video shows the colors of the prints on a large screen.

Uchiyama Susumu (1893-1980) was born in Shizuoka and built his collection while running a trading company. His first Hiroshige print, bought as a student, showed Ejiri, the harbor town where he grew up. He began collecting seriously after seeing ukiyo-e on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum. He preferred views of famous places to pictures of beauties and actors, and was drawn above all to Hiroshige's quiet, lyrical prints. He also helped found the Japan Ukiyo-e Society, now the International Ukiyo-e Society.