Hiroshige

Born Andō Tokutarō in 1797, Hiroshige entered a printmaking tradition dominated by urban pleasure scenes - beautiful women, popular actors - but followed Hokusai's lead toward landscape, trading boldness for something more poetic and ambient. His horizontal series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and his vertical One Hundred Famous Views of Edo built their power on subtle color: multiple impressions in a single area, painstaking bokashi gradations, labor that made weather feel alive on paper. He died on 12 October 1858, and scholars mark that date as the beginning of ukiyo-e's fast decline amid the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration. By the century's end his prints had crossed into Europe - Manet and Monet collected them, Van Gogh painted copies - and fed the Japonism that reshaped western painting.