The Floating Worlds of Utagawa Hiroshige

Edo-era Japanese prints at the British Museum, May – September 2025

The Culture Dump is expanding its horizons. Many thanks to Dafydd James-Williams for our inaugural guest post! I look forward to many more guest collaborations with academics in different fields in the future.

---

The Japanese language is often cited for having words for which there are no equivalents in English. Kogarashi, an autumnal wind that serves as a harbinger of the cold months ahead; komorebi, the sunlight that seeps through the canopy of a forest; or, perhaps more commonly known, mono no aware, the melancholic appreciation of the beauty to be found in ephemeral experiences.

If there is one thing that the British Museum’s retrospective of the woodblock prints or ukiyo-e of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) shows us, it’s that Hiroshige’s visual language translates and makes universal the untranslatable. This is seen in the stunning landscapes that capture ephemeral phenomena such as rainstorms, sunrises or full moons; equally, we see individuals caught in moments of reverie, absorbed in the routines of their working lives or captured in moments of playfulness. Morning Cherry Blossoms in the New Yoshiwara (1831) unites three levels of ephemerality – the mists of sunrise, the cherry blossoms on the trees that line the main street of the pleasure district of Edo (now Tokyo), and a courtesan saying farewell to a patron at the gates of one of the brothels.

The two exhibited versions of ‘Morning Cherry Blossoms in the New Yoshiwara’ (1831); the earlier (above) followed by and the latter (below).

The two exhibited versions of this print capture the ways in which the use of colour transforms the atmosphere, from one of melancholia created by the dominance of blue in the earlier version, to a warmer tone of life and renewal in the more varied palette of a latter one.

As the title suggests, this exhibition tracks Hiroshige himself in his journeying through Japan - both literally and imaginatively - capturing the Japanese in their daily work, life and play. For the most part, the individuals that he depicts are not those of the elite classes, but the humble and everyday; nor are they generally doing anything remarkable, rather we witness something that is remarkable - the joy to be found in the quotidian. For instance, in Listening to the Insects at Dōkan Hill (1840), three men share sake whilst gazing at a rising moon and, on the right-hand side, a young child shows off the crickets she has caught to her mother.

‘Listening to the Insects at Dōkan Hill’ (1840)

In Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857) people dash for cover, three men seek refuge under one umbrella and a lonely boatman continues his journey undaunted.

Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857)

The rain may be just that, but Hiroshige’s striated impression of rain make it vivid and dynamic, giving it the power to transform the landscape, with the skies darkening towards night, the river coming alive through the vitality of the rainfall and Edo transformed to a vague silhouette amidst the darkening skies.

Whilst landscapes dominate this retrospective, there are also a range of stunning bird and flower prints, some of which are accompanied by poems, portraits of geishas in flamboyantly patterned kimonos, uchiwa (summer fan) prints, and images derived from the folklore of Japan. The bird and flower prints are meticulous and yet they are also playful, with the animals sharing the foibles of Hiroshige’s human figures. In Owl and Maple Tree (1830), one of the Hiroshige images that Takashi Murakami paid homage to in his recent exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, the sleeping owl has closed in on itself, mirroring the spherical moon in the background, almost alerting the viewer to leave it be.

‘Owl and Maple Tree’ (1830)

One of my personal favourites of the exhibition is New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji (1857) in which foxes have gathered to pay homage to their guardian, the Shinto god of rice and fertility, Inari.

‘New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji’ (1857)

Hiroshige captures the tones of light and dark, of day and night and of the earthly and astronomical, set alongside each other in such a way that they become unified in eerie beauty.

Hiroshige is also an artist of the people. He produced an estimated 8,000 images over his lifetime, and they were printed in ever-larger numbers as he grew in popularity, meaning that those who were not privileged enough to be able to afford to travel to the sites he depicts, could experience them through Hiroshige’s eyes and imagination. In fact, his prints were produced in such large numbers and were so cheap that, like those of other ukiyo-e artists, they were used for the packaging of more valuable exports such as tea and porcelain to Europe and America. And it is through this usage that they became known to artists such as Van Gogh, Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec, which the final section of the exhibition deals with.

Looking at the legacy and influence of an artist may be a rather tired and predictable way to conclude an exhibition. Alongside the rather clichéd hanging scrolls which serve to tell the story of the journeyman’s life, it may be the one slight weakness of this exhibition. But clichés become so for good reasons and it’s understandable that the curators chose this approach to design and completion. Indeed, when reading about Van Gogh’s copying of The Plum Garden at Kameido (1857), we learn that one of the versions we are looking at was Van Gogh’s own print, displayed alongside his own meticulous traced copy of the dimensions of Hiroshige’s original in preparation for his oil painting.

‘The Plum Garden at Kameido’ (1857)

The Plum Garden at Kameido also serves to highlight two other elements of Hiroshige’s work that is seen throughout the exhibition: firstly, his boldness of colour, be it cherry red, Prussian blue or forest green; and secondly, the way he plays with perspective and the proto-Impressionism of much of his work. Here, the figures viewing the plum blossom are impossibly remote, making the viewer of the print that much more aware of their privileged viewing point.

Perhaps what this retrospective of Hiroshige’s work at the British Museum most powerfully generates in the viewer is a sense of natsukashii, another untranslatable Japanese world which approximates to a nostalgic yearning for the past and the people, places and experiences associated with it. Hiroshige’s nineteenth-century Japan may be unfamiliar to us, but that is no barrier to the yearning his images generate.

Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, continues at the British Museum until 7 September 2025