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Tag Archives: Utamaro

Utagawa Hiroshige: a “Human Touch”

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Japonisme

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Edo Castle, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Kameyama-Juku, Katsushika Hokusai, Ukiyo-e, Utamaro, Yaesu

 HIROSH~4
The Plum Garden in Kameido, by Hiroshige
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
 

Three main ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) artists:

 
  • Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753 – 31 October 1806),
  • Katsushika Hokusai (c. 31 October 1760 – 10 May 1849) and
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858).

Utawaga Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858), also called Andō Hiroshige and Ichiyūsai Hiroshige, his art-name, is the are of three Japanese ukiyo-e artists who had a major impact on European art in general and the Impressionists in particular. Japanese art was sent to Europe after a period of seclusion called sakoku. We have now reached the third and last ukiyo-e artist I will feature. Other ukiyo-e artists, printmakers, sent their artwork to Europe. Ukiyo-e prints were extremely popular and inexpensive. The three artists I am featuring are considered the most accomplished.

Childhood and Training

Hiroshige’s father, Andō Gen’emon, was one of thirty samurai who were fire warden protecting the Edo Castle. Hiroshige therefore lived in the Yayosu barracks, in the Yaesu area of Edo (today’s Tokyo). It appears Hiroshige’s first teacher was another fireman who taught him in the Chinese-influenced Kanō style of painting. However, it could be said that Hiroshige was mostly self-taught. For instance, he taught himself the impressionistic Shijō style. In fact, Hiroshige had difficulty finding a teacher, but nevertheless apprenticed under ukiyo-e master Utagawa Toyohiro. He would however inherit his father’s position as fire warden.

(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)800px-Hiroshige_le_Lac_d'Hakone800px-Tokaido16_Yui

Yui-huku (16th station)
Kameyama-Juku in the 1830s (46th station)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
 

Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1832-34)

In 1832, when his son was old enough to replace him as fire warden, Hiroshige was invited to join an embassy of Shogunal officials to the Imperial court and accepted the invitation. The road linked the shōgun‘s capital, Edo (Tokyo) to the imperial capital, Kyōto. Hiroshige stayed at fifty-three overnight stations along the road and made several sketches at each station.

According to Wikipedia, Hiroshige “carefully observed the Tōkaidō Road (or ‘Eastern Sea Route’), which wended its way along the shoreline, through a snowy mountain range, past Lake Biwa, and finally to Kyōto.” His series of prints, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, were extremely successful, and Hiroshige’s reputation was assured.” (See Hiroshige, Wikipedia.)

He then produced his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and made several series, some derivative:

Famous Places in Kyōto (1834), 
Eight Views of Lake Biwa (1835), 
Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō (c. 1837).
 

The success of his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō allowed Hiroshige to devote his time to his art and to teaching. In all, he made about 5,000 prints. His last series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, commissioned by a wealthy — if that is possible— Buddhist monk who paid “up-front,” which helped Hiroshige whose financial circumstances were relatively humble.

398px-Hiroshige,_Horikiri_iris_garden,_1857392px-100_views_edo_111

Horikiri Iris Garden
(influenced Art Nouveau)
Drum Bridge, Meguro River
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
 

One Hundred Views of Edo (1856-1858)

Hiroshige never lived to see the success of his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-1858). He became a Buddhist monk and started painting his Hundred Famous Views of Edo. He died, aged 62, during the great Edo cholera epidemic of 1858, but may not have been a victim of cholera. The Hundred Views were therefore completed by Chinpei Suzuki, a former apprentice who was married to Hiroshige’s daughter Otatsu and whose art-name became Hiroshige II. The couple separated and Otatsu married another student of her deceased father: Hiroshige III.

This series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was in Vincent van Gogh‘s collection of ukiyo-e prints. He made at least two paintings, featured below, based on two views of Edo.

(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)Hiroshige_Van_Gogh_1Hiroshige_Van_Gogh_2

left: Hiroshige, “The Plum Garden in Kameido”
right: Van Gogh, “Flowering Plum Tree”
left: Hiroshige, “Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake”
right: Van Gogh, “The Bridge in the Rain”
 

Conclusion: a “Human Touch”

“Hiroshige captured the very essence of what he saw and turned it into a highly effective composition. There was in his work a human touch that no artist of the school had heretofore achieved; his pictures revealed a beauty that seemed somehow tangible and intimate. Snow, rain, mist, and moonlight scenes compose some of his most poetic masterpieces.”[i]

In this quotation from the Encyclopædia Britannica, the keywords are “the very essence of what he saw” and “a beauty that seemed somehow tangible and intimate.” 

These words describe Hiroshige’s art, but they can also be used to describe Impressionism, the words “essence” and “intimate” in particular. To a large extent, Impressionism is characterized by what seems a brief glance at the subject, capturing the “essence,” which still makes art longer than life,[ii] and the personal manner in which the artist sees a “reality.”

Beauty is not an absolute. It is, very much, “in the eye of the beholder.” As for reality, it is as manifold as the ways it can be viewed.

Hiroshige also influenced Mir iskusstva, a twentieth-century Russian art movement in which Ivan Bilibin was a defining figure.

______________________________
[i] Richard Lane, ed. “Hiroshige.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 03 Jul. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/266818/Hiroshige>.
 
[ii] As in: Ars longa, vita brevis.
 
Resources:
Andō Hiroshige (the most complete)
Van Gogh dans la lumière japonaise d’Hiroshige
 
Two Women (Photo credit: probably, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
95
 
Hirochige
Muzyka czarodzieja Hiroshige. W tle chiński flet bambusowy yogi. Idealna muzyka do medytacji! (ideal for meditation)
Bamboo flute 
 

121151-050-13C78C4B

White Heron and Irises, c. 1833
From “Pictures of Flowers and Birds,”
a series of eight prints.
(Photo credit: Photos.com/Jupiterimages 
[Encyclopædia Britannica])
 
 
© Micheline Walker
3 July 2013
WordPress
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Related articles
  • Mount Fuji has long been an icon (japantimes.co.jp)
  • Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme (michelinewalker.com)
  • Katsushika Hokusai: Beauty (michelinewalker.com)

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Katsushika Hokusai: Beauty

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Art, Japonisme

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Claude Monet, Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Japonism, Mount Fuji, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Utamaro

 
Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai, 1832 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Related Post: Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme
 
  • Kitagawa Utamaro  (c. 1753 – 31 October 1806),
  • Katsushika Hokusai (c. 31 October 1760 – 10 May 1849) and
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858).

Beginning in the 1850s, the influence of Japonism on European art in general and French art in particular was pervasive. In my last post, I named three artists: Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. All three were ukiyo-e painters of the Edo period. But there were other ukiyo-e painters and it is still possible to purchase Japanese estampes. Prints belonging to original series executed by our three artists and other masters are very expensive. However, affordable prints are available. Moreover one need not be ashamed of hanging a reproduction on a wall in one’s home.

Katsushika Hokusai

In this post, I will simply discuss beauty: its relativity and mankind’s ability to see beauty in the unfamiliar. However, I will not do so in any depth.

At the top of our post, is a very famous print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It is the first in a series of thirty-six prints constituting Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1823-1829). One may see all thirty-six views by clicking on the title of the series: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Umegawa in Sagami Province,
The Kazusa Province sea route
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
 
Umegawa_in_Sagami_province
 
 800px-The_Kazusa_sea_route

Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji

Not only did Hokusai make a series of thirty-six prints depicting various views of Mount Fuji, but he went on to make a hundred: One-hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834). Hokusai demonstrated that depending on the direction from which Mount Fuji was drawn, not to mention the weather and the season, depictions of its reality varied. To the Impressionists, this was grist to the mill as they were fascinated by the manner in which light kept reshaping reality.

The more important factor, however, was the popularity of an art that differed from Western art. As soon as they reached Europe, the Japanese prints were considered beautiful by artists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and, later, Vincent van Gogh. Claude Monet purchased as many prints as he could. This degree of enthusiasm attested to the fact that, even otherwise expressed, “reality” could be beautiful and that it could be beautiful to several individuals.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Given the popularity of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one could presume that beauty is an absolute. This cannot be the case, at least not altogether. What Europeans saw as beautiful was not the beauty their academicists rewarded, but an exotic form of beauty and, in the case of Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the beauty of one print in particular: The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

The popularity of The Great Wave showed not only that many individuals could agree on what was and was not beautiful, but that many individuals could also agree that art rooted in an oriental form of aesthetics was beautiful. However, despite a consensus regarding the beauty of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, I doubt very much that its popularity suggested that beauty was an absolute.   

Quotations

Allow me to quote one of my former professors who writes that, in 1874, a group of painters working in Paris formed a “loose association” and put on an exhibition under the title of “The Anonymous Society of Painters and Sculptors.” Critics were in attendance:

“To describe what they saw there, critics coined a new word—Impressionism. It was no compliment, however. As one of them put it: We have seen an exhibition by the Impressionalists . . . M. Manet is among those who maintain that in painting one can and ought to be satisfied with the impression.  . . .[They] appear to have declared war on beauty.”[i]

Émile Zola spoke for the Impressionists when he declared flatly that,

“. . . Beauty is no longer an absolute, a preposterous universal standard. Beauty is identical with itself. . . . Beauty lives within us, not outside us. What do I care for philosophical abstraction, for an ideal perfection conjured up by a small group of men! What interests me as a man is mankind, the source of my life.”[ii]

Woman looking in Mirror (Artinthepicture.com)
Woman (hellaheaven-ana.blogsp)
Woman profile (Wikipaintings)

mirrorHokusai1

woman-profile

Conclusion

One particularly “avid” collector of Japanese prints was Frank Lloyd Wright.  In fact, Wright also sold ukiyo-e woodblock prints. (See Frank Lloyd Wright, Wikipedia.)

However, I will close this post by quoting Van Gogh. (See Japonaiserie [Van Gogh], Wikipedia.)

“In a letter to Theo dated about 5 June 1888 Vincent remarks

About staying in the south, even if it’s more expensive — Look, we love Japanese painting, we’ve experienced its influence — all the Impressionists have that in common — [so why not go to Japan], in other words, to what is the equivalent of Japan, the south? So I believe that the future of the new art still lies in the south after all.” 
_________________________
[i] G. H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), p. 92. Quoted in Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painters and Painting, 1760-1960 (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 181.
[ii] Alan Gowans, loc. cit.
 

800px-Hokusai_1760-1849_Ocean_waves

Ocean Waves 
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
 
© Micheline Walker
30 June 2013 
WordPress
 
  
“Lullaby From Itsuki Village” (Itsuki no Komoriuta)
Toshiko Yonekawa 

Related articles

  • Great Waves: Inspired by Hokusai (June 2013) (hannahsartclub.wordpress.com)
  • Utamaro’s Women & Japonisme (michelinewalker.com)

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