Hiroshige: Nature and the City

Hiroshige: Nature and the City is the most extensive English-language overview to date on the life and work of the celebrated Japanese ukiyo-e print designer, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and it draws from the largest private collection of Hiroshige's prints outside Japan, the Alan Medaugh collection.

The publication includes five essays by leading scholars in the field. Rhiannon Paget provides an in-depth introduction to Hiroshige's life and the evolution of his art. John T. Carpenter delves into the rich world of poetry as visualized in the artist's oeuvre of the natural world. Translations of the poems that appear on a number of the Hiroshige's works have also been transcribed and translated. Andreas Marks writes on the artist's collaboration with other print designers and on the publishers who produced his prints, while Shiho Sasaki explores the colorants in Hiroshige's prints and the artist's use of color as an expressive tool. These essays are followed by an annotated catalogue of five hundred works in the Medaugh collection compiled and written by Jim Dwinger.

Divided into nine categories - Early Works, Landscapes, The Natural World, Narrative and Humor, Fan Prints, Wrappers, Triptychs, Harimaze-e, and Legacy - this section offers a comprehensive view of Hiroshige's creative breadth. His urban views of Edo and his famous images of the locations along the Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō highways offer a glimpse of city life and the countryside of Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century. The catalogue also discusses the differences between variant editions of Hiroshige's prints, thus providing valuable comparative material for scholars, dealers, and collectors.