Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road – a 'rapturous' exhibition

Hiroshige's Tōkaidō Autumn Moon – Restaurants at Kanagawa, Musashi Province

(Image credit: Alan Medaugh)

This exhibition is something of a landmark, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It is the first in this country in 25 years "to celebrate so extensively" the prolific Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797- 1858), a graphic genius whose work had a huge impact far beyond Japan. Born into "a low-ranking samurai family" in Edo (now Tokyo), Hiroshige became renowned for his "lyrical and atmospheric colour-woodblock prints".

Like other artists of the "floating world" (a pleasure-seeking urban lifestyle), he created pictures of bijin (beautiful women), actors and street scenes, before turning to landscape, a genre he helped invigorate: he made his name with a series depicting the Tokaido, the coastal highway between Edo and Kyoto. His prints were disseminated widely and eventually made their way to Europe. His "bold" artistic vision is "everywhere apparent" in this show, which presents almost 120 prints and paintings, "awash with enchanting images of Japan's awe-inspiring scenery".

Hiroshige "lived in turbulent times, just before Japan's opening up to the West", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Yet there was also a boom in domestic tourism, and a demand for guide books and images recording pilgrimages or sight-seeing tours. He was a commercial artist; many of his pictures – "of crowds milling over bridges towards famous shrines" or "twirling their parasols" in celebrated beauty spots – are essentially tourist posters. This doesn't make them any less stunning, though. That he conjured such effects using woodblock, a notoriously difficult technique, makes them all the more remarkable. He "designed his images to maximise the limited possibilities of his medium", using "startling and essentially abstract" imagery to represent natural phenomena: "the trails of light-filled smoke drifting across dark mountains" in Karuizawa (1830s), for instance, "were created essentially by leaving the paper blank". Such works would have a major impact on European art.

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Western artists took more than stylistic cues from Hiroshige, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The impressionists, it's clear, borrowed a whole "philosophy" from him: that of celebrating "pleasure in the passing moment" and savouring "little freedoms". Hiroshige's pictures see people delighting in transient moments, from "a shower of rain or fresh crisp snow to a restaurant meal or trip to the theatre". One sees a group of people wrapped up warm to watch the spectacle of falling snow; another depicts a crowd enjoying an al fresco dinner on a dried-up riverbed, laughing and chattering away, and unwittingly anticipating Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Such is European art's obvious debt to Hiroshige that a final section exploring his "global influence" feels rushed and incomplete. That aside, this is a "rapturous" exhibition packed with images that still feel "fresh" and timeless.