Hokusai and Hiroshige

Looking at landscape in Japanese Prints - comparing Hokusai and Hiroshige, two late Edo Period artists.

‘Fuji from Kagikazawa’, late 1820s, Hokusai. See image at http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc130574

'The Salt-Beach at Gyotoku’, late 1830s, Hiroshige. See image at http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc138881

Both used landscape differently. Before them landscape used sparingly,as evocation or background. They also marked the high point of skill and technique in traditional ukiyo-e. After this, the arrival of the box camera, newspapers and western engravings. Hokusai’s landscapes are more closely related to our logic’s idea of beauty, nature shaped and ordered by human reason. Hiroshige’s work seems more evocative of nature in its raw form - observing its chaotic roughness as well as its harmonious order. 

• Hokusai

“Poetic, evocative landcape of the mind..They are static, unnreal, monumental and contrived; but they sing of nature.”

“…architectural designs of lasting beauty…nature becomes an intelluctual thing to be appreciated, studied, comprehended and filed in memory”.

• Hiroshige

Lyric version of nature.

“He studied natures moods, revealed in storms, sang with birds, sketched the effect of night shadows upon a scene, and spent a lifetime reporting what he saw. He designed a print every day for 33 years…His best prints are spontaneous rather than formal. They smell of the earth rather than of the mind.”