A New Genre of Woodblock Prints in Japan
Hiroshige’s most famous series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi), launched the genre of landscape woodblock prints in Japan in the early 1830s. This series and many of his other series of views along the Tōkaidō were in a horizontal format, the format that Western artists have traditionally preferred for depicting views of natural landscapes. However, in traditional Chinese painting, mountain landscapes were vertical, allowing artists to create depth by layering elements of the scene upwards to represent the foreground, middle ground and distance. Many Japanese artists adopted this approach in paintings, and Hiroshige introduced it into his landscape
prints, seemingly equally comfortable with both orientations. Later in his life, he designed more vertical landscapes, most famously in his series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo , published in the late 1850s, in which he created many designs, such as the image of the summer downpour on Ohashi Bridge, which benefit greatly from the verticality of the composition.
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