(all artworks are sold without the "Calliope's Bucket" stamp)
Woodblock prints have been restored as closely as possible to their intended colors and appearance, with extensive research into the original pigments. Seams from folding and scuffs have also been removed. The print you are viewing is as close to a fresh print as possible, in the spirit of the Ukiyo-e tradition.
Many of these prints were produced for ephemeral purposes, as advertisements for Kabuki plays, or as political satire, they were also often used as household artworks. The meaning of Ukiyo-e, "Pictures of the Floating World" reflects this ephemerality. Most Ukiyo-e prints are between 100 and 250 years old and the printing blocks have often been lost. Due to the nature of the production process, and the frequent recarving of printing blocks, there is no original in the sense of western artworks, Ukiyo-e prints were printed tens to hundreds of times.
The signature on each print gives the name of the artist, the woodblock carver, and the inspecting censor.
Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重, 1797 – October 12, 1858)
One of the last major ukiyo-e artists in the classical tradition, Hiroshige was heavily influenced by Hokusai's earlier focus on landscape prints. He was imitated by western artists such as Van Gough to an extent that is usually underestimated. Paradoxically, Japanese art itself was transformed by Western models following the Meiji restoration ten years after his death. Hiroshige's focus on landscape studies, with an eye for the effects of light and perspective on the subject, foreshadowed the impressionist movement in Europe. He specialized in technically accomplished series of prints, such as "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō" and The "Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō." These can be compared with Hokusai's "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji," or "A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls." He also produced bird and flower prints in the Chinese tradition.
Hiroshige was born into a Samurai family descended from Tanaka Tokuemon, an influential Northern lord from the late 1600s. His father died in 1809, and he inherited his job of preventing fires in Edo castle. This left him plenty of free time for artistic pursuits. He started painting soon after his parents' death (his mother died the same year), and studied the methods of various schools without committing to any of them. From early on Hiroshige signed his work in his own name, unusual at the time.
His early work mostly consists of actor prints (which provided a reliable source of income), "Okubi-e, or large head pictures" (a bizarrely named genre of what are best termed fashion prints of women's heads, and busts of actors), and book illustrations. Starting in about 1830 he began to concentrate on the landscapes and bird and flower prints he is famous for today. Hiroshige's wife helped finance his trips to various locations by selling her clothing and ornamental comb collection, in the finest "starving artist" tradition. He was never particularly financially successful, and this paradoxically increased his artistic output as he cranked out huge landscape collections for meager payment. In 1856 Hiroshige became a monk, although this did not stop him from working on his well known "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo." He died two years later, his death poem reads:
I leave my brush in the east
and set forth on my journey
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land
Meisho Edo hyakkei (名所江戸百景)
Mokuboji Uchigawa Gozen-sai hata (木母寺内川御前栽畑)
From the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Tokyo),
Mokuboji Temple, Uchigawa Inlet, Gozensaihata (vegetable) garden - No. 35 - 1857
The Mokuboji temple, on the Uchigawa inlet of the Sumida river (for a view of the Sumida river, see https://www.etsy.com/listing/196051951/grove-on-the-sumida-river-ukiyo-e from the same series), was a popular tourist destination for residents of Edo. Like many tourist traps, it had a tragic history; the temple started as a grave mound. In the 900s, an anonymous wandering monk decided to memorialize (and possibly bury) a boy called Umewaka. Born into a noble family, Umewaka had somehow become lost and was kidnapped by a slave trader, he was overworked and died of disease and exhaustion on the riverbank. There is also a Noh play, Sumidagawa, describing his distraught mother's desperate search for her lost son. The simple memorial slowly developed into a large temple complex, only the edge of which is shown in this print. The two elegantly dressed women in the foreground are making their way to the famous and exclusive Uehan seafood restaurant, part of the Mokuboji complex. Hiroshige must have been fond of this restaurant, he also depicts it in his series "The 26 Best Restaurants and Teahouses of Edo," worth checking out for those interested in Edo fine dining. The fields surrounding the river were devoted to the cultivation of vegetables specifically for the Shogun, apparently 36 different varieties. The shogun Iesada visited the garden a month before this print was published, possibly explaining its inclusion in the series.
Publisher:
Uoya ( Totoya, Sakanaya ) Eikichi < Uoei > Odaya
魚屋栄吉 ＜魚栄＞小田屋幕末
Approximate image sizes:
9" x 13" fine art paper - image size 7" x 10"
11" x 14" fine art paper - image size 8.4" x 12"
13" x 19" fine art paper - image size 10.8" x 15.5"
17" x 25" fine art paper - image size 14" x 20"
