Japanese Print "Plum Estate, Kameido" by Utagawa Hiroshige

Title:Plum Estate, Kameido

Date:1857

Source:Honolulu Museum of Art
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Description:

The Plum Garden at Kameido is perhaps one of the best-known Hiroshige prints outside Japan because Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) copied it as an oil painting in 1877. By copying Japanese prints, he learned how to use colors differently for their decorative rather than descriptive potential, so that the sky, for example, could be painted a vivid red without appearing unnatural. Van Gogh also adopted from Japanese prints the expressive power of large areas of a single color, brushed in relatively flat strokes. The Academy owns three different impressions of this print, of which this is the earliest. All three prints demonstrate Hiroshige's unique composition: objects in front are exaggerated in size, which was a modified way of using Western single-point perspective that Hiroshige developed in both his paintings and prints. Also, the vertical format for landscape ukiyo-e used in the entire One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series was a change from the traditional horizontal format that increased the popularity of Hiroshige's prints in a highly competitive market and expanded his audience. (Feb 2011)

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