Hiroshige: Serene visions that completely banish the turmoil of the world

Telegraph

27-04-2025

A gentle sense of poetry suffuses this new exhibition at the British Museum, the first in this country for more than a quarter of a century to celebrate so extensively the prolific Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Awash with enchanting images of Japan's awe-inspiring scenery (including Mount Fuji's attractive snow-clad cone), it made me forget, for a wonderful hour or two, about all the turmoil besetting the world. I left determined never to doom-scroll again, and appreciative of simple natural phenomena, such as the soft quality of a moonbeam, or blossom whisked along by the breeze.
Born into a low-ranking samurai family in Edo (present-day Tokyo), then the largest city in the world, Hiroshige became renowned for his lyrical and atmospheric colour-woodblock prints. To begin with, like other commercial artists of the so-called 'floating world' (defined, in the catalogue, as the pleasure-seeking 'domain of popular culture, fashion and entertainment'), he devised pictures of 'bijin' (beautiful women) and kabuki actors, before turning, in the early 1830s, to the minor genre of landscape prints, which he helped to reinvigorate.
He made his name with a series of prints of the Tokaido, Japan's 310-mile-long eastern coastal highway (connecting Edo with the imperial capital of Kyoto), and travel became a principal theme – although he also produced spellbinding prints of birds and flowers.
Set within a circular gallery above the Reading Room, and immaculately designed to evoke traditional Japanese craftsmanship, the exhibition presents almost 120 prints (and several paintings) by Hiroshige, representing the scope of his career. Throughout, it emphasises printmaking's collaborative nature: Hiroshige worked closely with publishers, who commissioned and financed individual series, as well as highly skilled craftsmen. The latter included cutters who, after pasting his original outline drawings onto liquorice-like blocks of polished mountain cherry wood, carefully chiselled away while retaining a sense of the spontaneity and rhythm of his brush. Master-printers specialised in 'bokashi', or subtle tonal gradation, a hallmark of Hiroshige's work.
Nevertheless, the uniqueness, and strength, of his artistic vision is everywhere apparent. Although there are examples of turmoil in his oeuvre (a view of the Naruto whirlpools is a memorable example), in general, Hiroshige's landscapes are characterised by a sense of serenity and cosmic order, sometimes offset by a humorous flourish kindly poking fun at human folly.
Given the seeming anonymity of his style, his pictures appear to provide documentary records of a bygone way of life, as, say, workers wearing straw raincoats scurry for shelter during showers. Hiroshige was brilliant at depicting downpours and their effects.
Yet, he often took bold, imaginative artistic decisions to enliven his compositions, such as adopting a street-level perspective to immerse the viewer in the action, or contrasting something surprisingly large in the foreground – an eagle, say, or a fluttering, carp-shaped banner – with a far-off subject.
He also experimented successfully with depicting different sources of light (a bonfire, a lantern, the moon); ingeniously, in some nocturnes, bare patches of paper represent lamplight or enticing illumination within an inn. Above all, though, as suggested here by a calming soundtrack of streams and waterfalls, birds and crickets, it is his sensitivity to ephemeral natural beauty – blossoming plum trees, swooping kingfishers – that hits home.