Hiroshige and Japan art: Winter season

Hiroshige and Japan art: Winter season

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) inspired impressionists from all over the northern hemisphere. Other acclaimed ukiyo-e artists also influenced impressionist art: including Harunobu, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, Utamaro, and others.

The Shinto shrine above continues to attract the faithful. Thus women can be seen in the environs of this holy Shinto shrine despite the horrendous winter conditions.

The art scene above it is like a mirage. After all, the art piece titled ‘A Snowy Evening at Kambara Station’ is far from the normal winter scene of this area.

The Met Museum says, “Deep snow covers the Kanbara slope in the evening. Fresh snow falling on travelers, houses, trees, and mountains create a quiet that is broken only by the crunch of footsteps in the snow. This scene is almost entirely imaginary because it rarely snows in this area.”

The British Museum says, “He started producing landscape prints in the early 1830s, establishing his own unique style with the series ‘Famous Places in Edo’ (Ichiyusai signature) and ‘Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Highway’ of 1832-3. He continued to excel at views of famous places throughout his career and managed to express in great detail the poetic sensibility inherent in the climate and topography of Japan and the people who lived there. Hiroshige also designed many masterpieces in the genre of bird and flower prints, once again creating a world where poetry and painting combined.”

Artists including Van Gogh (1853-90), Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), and others, were influenced by Hiroshige and other ukiyo-e artists.

Dobuzhinsky said, “I liked to choose a viewpoint of my own so that the composition would be striking, unusual; in that, I had the constant example of Hiroshige before my eyes”

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