One of the most influential Japanese artists of the nineteenth century, master in the landscape genre, thanks to the introduction of the particular asymmetrical visions that characterize his works. In his best compositions, the artist often depicts an element in the foreground leaving the landscape in the background with a technique that can be defined as “pre-photographic”, original perspective effects with a strong visual impact.
That became the “vision” of the first Japanese photographers who tried to immortalise the landscape that emerged in the pictorial works of Hiroshige’s ukiyoe, or Hokusai to the point of intervening with the color on the photographs.
Hirosghige was also very skilled in describing and differentiating the weather conditions, so much so as to be called the “master of rain and snow”. His production is part of the well-known artistic current ukiyoe (浮世 絵, translatable into “images of the floating world”), reflecting a society founded on ephemeral ambitions, in the description of a lifestyle that abandons reality and he takes refuge in light-heartedness as in melancholy, reflecting a contemporary culture from which Japan already wanted to free itself.
SCUDERIE DEL QUIRINALE