Japanese woodblock prints have been so popular, so pervasively influential and so widely reproduced over the past century and a half that it’s tempting to think that we know them quite as well as we need to. Artists from Monet to David Hockney have lovingly interpreted them on our behalf; Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and other views of Fuji have been pastiched over everything from T-shirts and children’s backpacks to Pink Floyd’s drum kit. But if you’re among those who think they’ve pretty much had it with the world of quaint bridges, grimacing samurai and courtesans twirling parasols in the snow, a quick glance around this jewel of an exhibition will be enough to convince you that actually, you really haven’t.
It is apparently no more than a happy accident that the British Museum’s Hiroshige: artist of the open road is opening within a week of the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner. But comparisons between its subject, the great Japanese landscape artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and his near contemporary Turner become inescapable and highly instructive once you’ve formed the connection. While the two artists’ work couldn’t be more dramatically different on the surface, Hiroshige more than gives Turner a run for his money as a radical interpreter of the effects of nature.
Hiroshige is slightly less well known than the older Hokusai, the great polymath, the Leonardo of Japanese art if you like, who excelled in all genres. Yet Hiroshige created more iconic landscape images than Hokusai or indeed any other Japanese artist.
Comprising 117 prints, the majority never displayed before and including several that are believed to be the only surviving examples of those particular images, the British Museum’s first ever Hiroshige exhibition (and the first to be held in London for a quarter of a century) wants to give us a fuller sense of the artist than has been seen before – to show that Hiroshige was more than just a landscape artist.
Images of birds are charming, but lack Hokusai’s quasi-scientific curiosity. Prints of kimono-clad women picking oysters at low tide or disporting themselves in evening breezes are lively enough, but demonstrate that you need the obsessiveness of an Utamaro – considered Japan’s master in matters of female beauty – to create a transcendent image from this sort of subject.
So the show quickly homes in on landscape, and the best of them are quite heartbreakingly brilliant. Looking at the evocation of simultaneous moonlight and daylight in Evening View of the Eight Scenic Spots of Kanazawa (1857), with its islands and headlands dispersed over a tranquil inland sea, it’s hard to imagine such subtle effects could be created by gouging into wooden blocks with a chisel.
Sudden Shower over Ohashi and Atake (1857) indicates the rain driving onto its scurrying figures with the disconcertingly simple device of scoring innumerable near-random lines down the image. It’s a technique that is imitated endlessly in Hockney’s current Paris exhibition and by Vincent van Gogh, whose painted copy of the work is reproduced alongside. Every sinuous line of the riverbank and the nodding willow branches in the deceptively simple Seba (1830) seem to echo the languorous movements of the pole-wielding boatmen.
Yet Hiroshige’s subject isn’t so much landscape per se in the Turner or Constable sense, as man’s interactions with the land: farmers lugging bales of hay, Samurai lords travelling Japan’s great trunk roads and, most of all, tourists.
While Hiroshige lived in turbulent times, just before Japan’s opening up to the west, which saw “famine, social crisis and foreign military incursions”, as the wall texts tell us, it was also an era of burgeoning travel within Japan, when there was a demand for guide books and for images that recorded and inspired pilgrimages and sightseeing tours, while providing “imaginative escape” for those who couldn’t afford to travel. If Hiroshige’s images of crowds milling over bridges towards famous shrines or twirling their parasols (of course) in celebrated beauty spots are, on one level, the 19th-century Japanese equivalent of BBC One’s The Travel Show, they allow us to participate in these vicarious journeys with extraordinary vividness, even now.
But it’s in his evocations of particular climatic states that Hiroshige comes into his own as a rival to great Western landscape painters. Kanbara – Evening Snow (1833-5) conveys the weight and muffling silence of snow on thatched roofs in a near-miraculous balance of subtly graded whites and greys. In Shono – Sudden Rain Shower, created the same year, litter-bearers and figures in straw coats run panicking up and down a dead-straight diagonal hill, while grey curtains of rain strafe the image from the opposite direction, and the layered silhouettes of bamboo trees create a sense of turbulent movement in the background. Hiroshige, we feel, has nailed the concept of “rain” for all time.
Where Turner and Constable worked in oil paint and watercolour, both ideally suited to capturing atmosphere, Hiroshige designed his images to maximise the limited possibilities of his medium, working with master printers using large numbers of carved blocks – one for each colour – stencils and rollers to painstakingly evoke the effects of light and atmosphere. The very limitations of their medium forced artists like Hiroshige to evolve startling and essentially abstract formulae for complex natural phenomena, which were seized on by Western modern artists looking for decisive new ways of representing the world. There are so many brilliant instances in this exhibition it’s almost humbling: the trails of light-filled smoke drifting across dark mountains in Karuizawa (1830s) created essentially by leaving the paper blank, or the current of a river seen as a ribbon of light in Arashiyama in Full Bloom (1834), to name just two.
This is an exhibition to restore your faith in art. If Turner was a great precursor to the Impressionists, so was Hiroshige. If Turner was a great artist of light and atmosphere, so was Hiroshige. That the works of these great near-contemporaries should have looked so utterly different is a testament to the near-limitless imaginative capacities of humanity. And don’t let AI tell you otherwise.
‘Hiroshige: artist of the open road’ is at the British Museum from 1 May until 7 September
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