Woodblock Prints By Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 1858) Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was born Ando Tokutaro into a minor samurai family in Edo. As a teenager, he trained in painting and print design with the Utagawa School, and was given the artist name Hiroshige, taking “hiro” from his teacher Utagawa Tokuhiro and the school's name Utagawa. Hiroshige went on to be one of the great painters and print designers of the 19th century, specializing in images of landscapes. His best-selling series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi) depicted the fifty-three stopping points along the 323-mile-long route between Edo (modern Tokyo) and Kyoto and launched the genre of landscape woodblock prints. In total, Hiroshige designed between 4,000 and 4,500 prints, including 2,000 landscapes (800 of Edo, 800 of the Tōkaidō and 800 of other places in Japan). His series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo featured vertical views of his beloved city, Edo, and he had created well over 100 views when his life was cut short by a cholera epidemic in 1858.
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