Japanese woodblock print master takes spotlight in new British Museum exhibit

A new British Museum exhibition pays homage to a 19th-century master of the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print.

Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road features more than 100 pieces by Utagawa Hiroshige, who first plied his craft creating images of the courtesans and kabuki actors of Edo’s (now Tokyo) pleasure district.

But it was Hiroshige’s travel scenes that made his name as “a sharp observer of fleeting moments,” the Financial Times wrote: His journey down a 500-km coastal highway noted for its inns and tea houses resulted in the hugely popular The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō.

In one scene, travelers scramble for cover during a cloudburst, as an entire landscape transforms instantly through Hiroshige’s use of “tempo, texture, [and] mood.”