Hiroshige

Hiroshige’s great talent developed in the 1830s. In 1832 he made a trip between Edo and Kyōto along the famed highway called the Tōkaidō; he stayed at the 53 overnight stations along the road and made numerous sketches of everything he saw. He published a series of 55 landscape prints titled Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō —one for each station, as well as the beginning of the highway and the arrival in Kyōto. The success of this series was immediate and made Hiroshige one of the most popular ukiyo-e artists of all time. He made numerous other journeys within Japan and issued such series of prints as Famous Places in Kyōto (1834), Eight Views of Lake Biwa (1835), Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō ( c. 1837), and One Hundred Views of Edo (1856–58). He repeatedly executed new designs of the 53 Tōkaidō views in which he employed his unused sketches of previous years