“Hiroshige: Nature and the City” and “Japan on a Glass Plate”

Hiroshige: Nature and the City, John Carpenter, Jim Dwinger, Andreas Marks, Rhiannon Paget, Shiho Sasaki & Japan on a Glass Plate: The Adventure of Photography in Yokohama and Beyond, 1853–1912, Sebastian Dobson (Ludion, December 2023)

In 1844, a young Japanese artist named Sakurada Kyūnosuke (1823-1914) happened upon a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that had been invented in France five years earlier. Sakurada, who generally went by the name of Renjō, was at the time an apprentice in the studio of a painter of the Kanō school, a loosely organized group whose members had served for more than two centuries as the official artists of the Tokugawa regime. Renjō was astonished by the verisimilitude of the image he saw, but what shocked him was how it had been made: not with dyes and ink, but with a machine and chemical solutions. His stupefaction was such that he “broke all his brushes” and resolved henceforth to commit all his time and energy to learning photography. 

Not all Japanese artists reacted as dramatically upon encountering photography, but there is no denying that the mid-19th century was a period of tremendous change for many of them. Officially, the government was still pursuing its policy of national isolation, which had been in place since 1639. In practice however, information about the outside world was readily available thanks to trade with the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki, where the daguerreotype that mesmerized Renjō had entered the country. Elsewhere in Japan, foreign ships, mostly Russian and American, were testing the nation’s resolve and straying in local waters with growing regularity. The policy wall so carefully erected by the authorities finally came crashing down in 1854, when Commodore Matthew Perry forced the Shogunate to accept a trade deal with the United States. By the end of the decade, foreigners were pouring into newly opened treaty ports.

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Two recent books by Ludion, a Brussels-based publisher, examine how Japanese artists responded to their country’s changing domestic and international circumstances. The first, Hiroshige: Nature and the City, is a superb and comprehensive monograph on Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), one of the best-known and most successful ukiyo-e woodblock print designers in the entire tradition. The other, Japan on a Glass Plate, focuses on the early history of photography and its enthusiastic practitioners in Yokohama, which became a treaty port in 1859 and remained for decades afterwards the country’s centre for commercial photography. Both volumes are lavishly illustrated and printed in large-format on thick quality matte paper to allow for the full appreciation of all pictorial material.

Exposure to Western culture and ideas was an important driver of artistic change in 19th-century Japan, but it was not the only one. Economic and social transformations were crucial factors, too. Their beginning predates Hiroshige’s era, but culminated in his lifetime. Take for instance the nation’s transportation network. Since 1635, the Shogunate had forced all feudal lords to spend every other year in Edo (modern day Tokyo). This practice fostered the expansion of the nation’s roads which eventually linked every domain to the capital. The most important was the Tōkaidō, which snaked over 500 km along the Pacific coast from Kyōto, where the imperial family lived, to Edo, where the Shogun presided.

Merchants were quick to spot commercial opportunities, and so was the general public: by the early 19th century, when Hiroshige was growing up, tourism had become a popular activity. Publicly, the authorities frowned upon this “frivolous” pastime and tried to contain it by requiring that sojourners apply for permits. These however were straightforward to secure provided the purpose of the trip was framed in religious or medical terms. To give just one example: 4.5 million people are thought to have visited the Ise Grand Shrine in mid-1830.

Bamboo Yards, Kyōbashi Bridge
Bamboo Yards, Kyōbashi Bridge, 1857

All this travel spurred demand for guidebooks and souvenirs such as colorful woodblock prints. Those illustrating the Tōkaidō and its way stations were particularly popular. By the early 1830s, the road had even become the backdrop of numerous plays and novels, Shank’s Mare, a comical chronicle published serially by Jippensha Ikku between 1802-1814 being a notable example

It is no coincidence that Hiroshige, who hailed from a samurai family, albeit a low-ranking one, burst onto the artistic scene at that very moment with his series “Fifty-Three Stations along the Tōkaidō” (ca 1832-1833). Although by then he had already been working as a professional artist for more than a decade, he was not yet widely known, writes Jim Dwinger, an assistant curator at the Japan Museum SieboldHuis in Leiden and one of the five contributors to the book. The public was ready however, and the series became a massive success, going through several reprints over the following decades. It consolidated landscape as a major genre in ukiyo-e and set the path of Hiroshige’s career. While he had previously depicted a variety of subjects, from fearsome warriors to beautiful courtesans, and would continue to do so occasionally, from the 1830s onwards, the vast majority of his work consisted of cityscapes and natural scenery. Just on the Tōkaidō, Hiroshige produced 22 series for a total of 700 different designs.

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To Western audiences, Hiroshige’s prints are quintessentially Japanese, but domestic buyers at the time would have found them enticingly exotic. For instance, almost all his landscape series include decorative borders, writes Rhiannon Paget, the Curator of Asian Art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, in what was perhaps an attempt to mimic the decorative frames of Western paintings. Hiroshige also frequently relied on single-point perspective and cast shadows, two techniques “he would have learned from European engravings or Japanese adaptations of their imagery.” Another of his signature tricks, the positioning of a large object in the foreground to emphasize spatial depth, “was likely imported from the West via Chinese sources”, she adds.  All these lent an obvious cachet to his work.

Morning Cherry Blossoms at Shin-Yoshiwara, azuri-e print
Morning Cherry Blossoms the New Yoshiwara, azuri-e print with Western-style border, ca 1831

Artists of Hiroshige’s generation also had access to material that expanded their creative possibilities. A good example is Prussian blue, an expensive chemical dye invented in Berlin in 1704 and imported by the Dutch in Nagasaki. It was not until the 1820s however, when Chinese entrepreneurs found ways to manufacture it cheaply, that it became widely available to Japanese artists. A new type of monochrome prints, aizuri-e, which limited the color palette to shades of blue, became hugely popular. Other synthetic colors became available towards the end of Hiroshige’s life but were fully exploited only in the Meiji era (1868-1912), when garish hues became a feature of many ukiyo-e.

One unique aspect of Hiroshige: Nature and the City lies in its examination of the ukiyo-e production process. In the mid-1800s, a successful print might sell 3,000 to 4,000 copies, but these were not exact reproductions of each other. Overtime, woodblocks wore down so the contours of printed forms faded. To save money, a publisher might also choose to issue a new edition with fewer, or slightly different colors. As a result, there is a wide range of subtle variations between copies of the same design. Dwinger displays several examples side by side to help readers spot differences.

Hiroshige once emphasized that his work was not the product of his imagination. In the preface of a book published in 1858, he wrote: “I drew everything based on the life before me and made prints after those drawings.”  He also assured readers that “the disposition of every represented thing is exactly the same as it actually exists in reality.” This was good marketing, but a bit mendacious. True, Hiroshige produced sketches whenever he traveled and later used these as the basis of his studio work. But as Paget points out, his main source of inspiration lay in “black-and-white line drawings in woodblock-printed guidebooks or gazetteers”.

Given the value Hiroshige ascribed to depicting things as they “exist in reality”, it is tempting to imagine what he would have thought of the daguerreotype. He might very well have been as astonished as Renjō.  Yet, it is also easy to conceive how his initial enthusiasm might have quickly faded.

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All photographic processes are subject to manipulation and the daguerreotype was no different. As early as the 1860s, for instance, studios in Yokohama were offering colored versions of their portfolio. The goal was not simply to make the original black-and-white images a more accurate representation of the real world. Often, as Sebastian Dobson shows in Japan on a Glass Plate, artists added new details to create a different reality.

Kusakabe Kinbei, View of Mount Fuji, ca 1885-90
Kusakabe Kinbei, View of Mount Fuji, ca 1885-90

Both the daguerreotype and the wet-collodion process, which succeeded it and remained dominant until the early 1880s, required long exposures, the former more than the latter. Photographers thus often worked in the studio, where they could better control light conditions. In other words, much of early photography was produced in a contrived environment. Once a negative had been developed, colorists added their flourish, such as snow on the straw coat of a laborer, to make the figures more credible. Outdoor scenes were no less subject to tampering: Dobson shows how an assistant painted clouds on a glossy print of Mount Fuji while elsewhere another splashed red pigments to give a grey stone Torii the appearance of painted wood. Not quite the “reality” that Hiroshige claimed to value.

Nevertheless, these images provide fascinating glimpses into a rapidly changing world. In his introductory essay, Dobson lays out the historical context and then examines more than 150 pictures from the mid-1860s to the early 1900s by dozens of photographers, mostly from Japan. He draws attention to tiny but telling details that point to shifts in economic conditions or social mores: a man in Tokyo, barely visible in the background of a city scene, wearing a Western hat in 1871; a woman in a kimono, her fingers adorned with rings, a practice unseen until the mid-1870s; a street in Kyoto with a single gas lamp, an early sign of modernity in 1880.

Nobody realized it at the time, but capturing fleeting moments using light-sensitive technology would soon kill the livelihood of ukiyo-e artists. As cameras became increasingly portable, photography gained in popularity and gradually displaced woodblock prints as the main visual media of Japanese popular culture. By the first decade of the 20th century, ukiyo-e was a spent force. Whatever Hiroshige might have thought of the daguerreotype, we can be sure he would have grieved this outcome.


Martin Laflamme is a Canadian Foreign Service Officer who has served in Tokyo, Beijing (twice) and Kandahar. He is currently posted to Taipei.