Hiroshige's Views of Tokyo

This booklet illustrates a selection of 20 woodblock prints form the series of prints by Ando Hiroshige called "Meisho Edo Hakkei" or "One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo". Published between 1856-59, they were the last series designed by Hiroshige, who died in 1858. The woodblock print is the most familiar form of Japanese art known in the West. By the mid-19th century they were recognized as so revolutionary in concept when compared with European graphic traditions that they changed the course of European art. Hokusai introduced the landscape woodblock-print in the early years of the century, and it was perfected by Hiroshige (1797-1858), whose prints are "an evocative reminder of a slow-paced world, almost as far away from the frenetic Yoshiwara for whose denizens they were produced as they are from the differently high-speed world that produced the shinkansen "bullet train" that runs along the Tokaido Road today." Oliver Impey is the co-author (with Malcolm Fairley) of "The Dragon King of the Sea: 19th-Century Japanese Decorative Art from the John R. Young Collection".