Hiroshige
This beautiful woodcut belongs to Hiroshige's Views of Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces series . Like a visual tourist guide, the series consists of a print of a famous view from each of the 68 provinces of Japan, plus a print of Edo (the capital) and a contents page, for a total of 70 prints. The topics for the designs were famous places seen from the vantage point of a local.
The print designs documented a world that was about to change: a few months before the first prints were published, the Black Ships (the Western vessels) that contributed to the opening of Japan arrived. The Perry Expedition was a diplomatic and military expedition of warships of the United States Navy. The goals of this expedition included exploration, surveying, and the establishment of diplomatic relations and negotiation of trade agreements with various nations of the region. Commodore Perry's primary goal was to force an end to Japan's 220-year-old policy of isolation and to open Japanese ports to American trade, through the use of gunboat diplomacy if necessary. He reached his goal.
Also interesting is that the series uses a vertical layout for each of the prints. This was the first time such a format had been used in a major Japanese landscape print series. A likely reason for Hiroshige's choice was that rather than travel to the actual locations, he based many of his designs on Meisho Zue guidebooks that used a vertical, rather than horizontal, format. Smart! :D
P.S. Did you know Hiroshige's prints were popular among European artists, including Vincent van Gogh? Here's a story of one of them - Maple Trees at Mama.
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