Walking through Tokyo today, it’s hard to imagine what Edo looked like.
But when you spend time with Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, something shifts. The city starts to take shape — cherry blossoms in spring, sudden summer downpours, autumn moons over the river, snow settling on plum branches in winter. All of it held across 119 prints.
This isn’t a tourist guide or a photographic record. It’s one artist’s eyes, cutting through a city that was about to disappear. And somehow, more than 170 years later, it still arrives.
① A Series That Was Never Finished
Hiroshige began the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 1856, when he was already sixty years old. He worked quickly, releasing prints steadily into 1857 — and then, in 1858, he died of cholera, leaving the series unfinished. His student, the second-generation Hiroshige, added several prints to complete it, bringing the total to 119.
The timing matters. These years — 1856 to 1858 — came just after Commodore Perry’s arrival forced Japan to open its ports in 1853. The country was on the edge of enormous change. The Edo that Hiroshige was painting with such care would soon become Tokyo.
There was another shadow over these years. Just four months before the first prints appeared, in 1855, the Ansei Edo earthquake struck the city, causing severe damage across Edo.
Perhaps that is why the One Hundred Famous Views is so often read as more than a set of souvenir landscapes — as a quiet wish for a wounded city to recover. The prints issued earliest are said to favor places that had been spared, or already rebuilt. In Kinryūzan Temple at Asakusa, for instance, the five-storied pagoda and the temple halls all stand whole again — almost like a sign of hope.
This was not Hiroshige’s only motive, of course. A deep love for the Edo he was born into, an aging master’s ambition for bold new compositions, the commercial instinct of a publisher who knew a bestseller when he saw one — all of these are woven into the series. And yet, to read something like a quiet prayer into these pictures of a city insisting the famous places are still here is not far off the mark.
There is something quietly heartbreaking about all this. He finished a portrait of a city that was already leaving.
② The Two Prints That Moved Van Gogh
Of all the artists who fell under the spell of Japanese prints in the late nineteenth century — the wave that came to be called Japonisme — none looked harder at Hiroshige than Vincent van Gogh. He didn’t merely admire these prints; he copied them in oil, line for line, trying to learn what they knew.
Within this series, two prints carved their way into world art history.
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge — Rain falls diagonally across the frame, lashing the bridge, scattering the people crossing it. Van Gogh copied this print in oil paint, almost exactly. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote that Japanese artists “think in lines” and that he wanted to do the same. Standing in front of this print, you feel you understand what he meant.
Plum Garden at Kameido — A great old plum tree fills the foreground, its branches reaching across the frame, while tiny figures stand in the distance behind it. The composition deliberately subverts Western perspective, placing what is near large and what is far small, with a boldness that only ukiyo-e fully commits to. Van Gogh copied this one too.
Both prints have the quality of stopping you mid-step, making you say oh under your breath.
③ A Carp Leaping Out of the Frame: Suidōbashi, Surugadai
Nowhere is Hiroshige’s boldness more exhilarating than here. In the foreground, a single giant carp streamer fills the frame, swelling with wind, all but leaping out toward you. Far below and beyond it lie the Kanda River, the rooftops of Surugadai, and Mount Fuji in the distance. Near things enormous, far things tiny — this is the logic that startled Van Gogh and Monet, the very heart of Hiroshige’s genius. Flown for Boys’ Day, the carp seems to carry the pride of Edo itself streaming across the sky.
This “near-view” composition — something large up close, the world shrinking behind it — appears throughout the One Hundred Famous Views. Keep it in mind as we move through the four seasons.
④ Reading the Series by Season
The One Hundred Famous Views is arranged across the four seasons. Here are four that stay with me, each shown with the print itself.
Spring — The Suijin Shrine and Massaki on the Sumida River. Branches of double-flowered cherry fill the foreground, and through them we glimpse the Sumida River, the Suijin woods on the far bank, and — far off — Mount Tsukuba. Near blossoms framing a distant view: Hiroshige’s signature move. The soft, pale colors seem to dissolve spring itself into the paper.
Summer — Fireworks at Ryōgoku. Great blossoms of fire open in the night sky above a darkened Ryōgoku Bridge and a river crowded with pleasure boats. People and bridge sink into black silhouette, so that light itself becomes the subject. The muted, warm-toned glow of old-style fireworks somehow conveys the heat of an Edo summer night all the more. (Fireworks are a summer emblem, but in the series’ own catalog this print is filed under autumn, marking the close of the cool-evening season.)
Autumn — Maple Trees at Mama, the Tekona Shrine and Linked Bridge. Flaming maple leaves loom large in the foreground; beyond them lie the Mama inlet, the little shrine to Tekona, and a small linked bridge, with Mount Tsukuba hazy in the distance. Printing the foreground vividly and the distance pale, Hiroshige opens deep space within a single sheet. This is autumn at Mama, on the eastern edge of Edo.
Winter — Kinryūzan Temple at Asakusa. The snow-covered five-storied pagoda of Sensōji, and the great red lantern of the Kaminarimon hanging huge in the foreground. The vermilion of the lantern, the white of the snow, the green of the pines brace against one another — one of the finest near-view compositions in the whole series. This is also the pagoda rebuilt after the earthquake: the “sign of hope” from section ① stands here quietly, dressed in snow.
⑤ Then and Now
One of the pleasures of this series is that many of the places it depicts still exist — or at least, their names do.
Asakusa, Ueno, the Sumida River, Fukagawa — these are all still on the Tokyo map. Walking through those neighborhoods with a print in mind creates a strange doubling: the 170-year gap collapses for a moment, then opens again.
The buildings are gone. The river has shifted. But the direction Hiroshige was looking is still the same. I especially recommend wandering the Sumida River area near the Sumida Hokusai Museum with a few of these prints in mind — it’s a quietly rewarding way to spend an afternoon.
⑥ Where to See the Prints
Originals from the One Hundred Famous Views are held across the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
In Tokyo, the Ota Memorial Museum of Art (Harajuku) holds regular Hiroshige exhibitions. Online, the Metropolitan Museum’s collection offers high-resolution images of many prints for free — browsing all 119 that way is actually a rather good way to spend an hour.
For a different way of seeing these places, the photographer Kichiya has spent years standing where Hiroshige once stood. Beginning in 2013 and completing all 119 views by 2019, he photographed each location in present-day Tokyo from the same vantage point, in the same season, and at the same angle as the original print — then set his photograph beside Hiroshige’s. The series runs in Japanese only, but the language hardly matters: print and photograph, side by side, tell the whole story of what has changed and what has quietly endured. It is a remarkable feat of patience and devotion, and the finest companion I know for moving between the Edo of these prints and the Tokyo of today. (Published by nippon.com.)
A Final Thought
Hiroshige died before finishing this series.
But the 119 prints that remain are alive in a way that finished things sometimes aren’t. And there’s so much more to say about them — I find myself wanting to write about the Hundred Famous Views again, from a different angle, some other time.
And then there is Hokusai. Hiroshige is so often named in the same breath as Katsushika Hokusai — yet the two looked at the world in almost opposite ways: Hokusai circling a single mountain across thirty-six views, Hiroshige wandering a whole city through its four seasons. But that is a story for another time.
References
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hiroshige collection — metmuseum.org
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo — mfa.org
- Henry D. Smith II & Amy G. Poster, Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, Braziller, 1986
- Van Gogh Museum, Van Gogh and Japan — vangoghmuseum.nl
Image Credits — all Brooklyn Museum, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
- Cover & Section ③: Utagawa Hiroshige, Suidōbashi, Surugadai (Suidō Bridge and Surugadai), from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1856–58 — Wikimedia Commons
- Section ④ (Spring): Utagawa Hiroshige, The Suijin Shrine and Massaki on the Sumida River, 1856–58 — Wikimedia Commons
- Section ④ (Summer): Utagawa Hiroshige, Fireworks at Ryōgoku, 1856–58 — Wikimedia Commons
- Section ④ (Autumn): Utagawa Hiroshige, Maple Trees at Mama, the Tekona Shrine and Linked Bridge, 1856–58 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons
- Section ④ (Winter): Utagawa Hiroshige, Kinryūzan Temple at Asakusa, 1856–58 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons