Publisher's Synopsis
The reader may already be acquainted with the Hoeidō edition (1833-34) of The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō. This was the most popular print series ever made in Japan.
Hiroshige did two other editions, the Kyōka edition (abt 1838) and the Reischo (abt 1840) which is the focus in this book. We include thumbnails from the two other editions for comparison. It is a total view!
There were 53 post stations along this important road, apart from the start and terminus, in all 55 prints, which are all here in the order from Edo to Kyoto. The reader experiences the same journey with a completely different set of prints and can compare to the Rischo, Hoeidō and Kyōka editions. For details on the prints in the Hoeidō and Kyōka editions see author's books on these editions.
It is possible to travel the same road today and some villages are still looking quite like they did back then.
Utagawa Hiroshige (in Japanese: 歌川 広重), also called Andō Hiroshige (in Japanese: 安藤 広重;), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. He was born 1797 and died 12 October 1858.
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which is the subject of this book, and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
The main subjects of his work are considered atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose focus was more on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period (1603-1868).
