The definitive information to Utagawa Hiroshige’s masterwork is a feast for the eyes

Just beneath 200 years in the past, a revolution shook Japan’s artwork world. It went on to hit Europe like a storm. Until the 1830s, the woodblock prints often known as ukiyo-e — photos of the “floating world” of delight and leisure — had primarily portrayed characters from this world, notably kabuki actors and exquisite ladies.

But then, in late 1830, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) produced his “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” panorama sequence. Its huge success impressed Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) — a reasonably profitable kabuki illustrator — to show to panorama as nicely, producing “Famous Places within the Eastern Capital” in 1831. A 12 months later, he adopted up with “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido.” In these two years, Hokusai and Hiroshige reworked the world of ukiyo-e without end, abandoning the floating world in favor of mesmerizing landscapes that depicted mountains, valleys, villages, rivers and bridges. Over the following 16 years, Hiroshige produced a number of extra extremely profitable sequence of panorama prints, culminating in “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” — the biggest assortment of his profession.

Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Definitive Collector's Edition, by Andreas Marks. 320 pages, TUTTLE PUBLISHING, Nonfiction.