Estampes d hiroshige biography

Hiroshige, in full Andō Hiroshige, professional names Utagawa Hiroshige and Ichiyūsai Hiroshige, original name Andō Tokutarō, (born 1797, Edo [now Tokyo], Japan—died October 12, 1858, Edo), Japanese artist, one of the last great ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) masters of the colour woodblock print. His genius for landscape compositions was first recognized in the West by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. His print series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833–34) is perhaps his finest achievement.
Hiroshige was the son of Andō Genemon, warden of the Edo fire brigade. Various episodes indicate that the young Hiroshige was fond of sketching and probably had the tutelage of a fireman who had studied under a master of the traditional Kanō school of painting. In the spring of 1809, when Hiroshige was 12 years of age, his mother died. Shortly after, his father resigned his post, passing it on to his son. Early the following year, his father died as well. Hiroshige’s actual daily duties as a fire warden were minimal, and his wages were small.
Undoubtedly, these factors, plus his natural bent for art, eventually led him to enter, about 1811, the school of the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Toyohiro. Hiroshige is said to have first applied to the school of the more famous artist Utagawa Toyokuni, a confrere of Toyohiro. Had Hiroshige been accepted as a pupil by Toyokuni, he might well have ended his days as a second-rate imitator of that artist’s gaudy prints of girls and actors. Instead, it was doubtless the more modest and refined taste of Toyohiro that helped form Hiroshige’s style—and led his genius eventually to find full expression in the new genre of the landscape print.
Although receiving an artist name and a school license at the early age of 15, Hiroshige was no child prodigy, and it was not until six years later, in 1818, that his first published work appeared. In the field of book illustration, it bore the signature