One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
By: Hiroshige; introductory essays by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster ; commentaries on the plates by Henry D. Smith II ; preface by Arnold L. Lehman.
Contributors: Smith, Henry DeWitt.; Poster, Amy G., 1946-; Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Publisher: G. Braziller; Brooklyn Museum of Art
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
Subjects: Andō, Hiroshige, -- 1797-1858; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Ukiyoe; Tokyo (Japan) -- In art
Description: "Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, actually composed of 118 splendid woodblock landscape and genre scenes of mid-nineteenth-century Tokyo, is one of the greatest achievements of Japanese art. The series, reproduced here in its entirety for the first time in a Western edition, contains many of Hiroshige's best-loved and most extraordinary prints. It is a celebration of the style and world of Japan's finest cultural flowering at the end of the shogunate." "Hiroshige, perhaps the most brilliant of the ukiyo-e printmakers, revealed the panorama of his city's activities with subtle and vivid visual anecdotes: fireworks seen from the river, fashionable geishas on parade, the kabuki district at night, intimate moments in the gardens and teahouses. But more than a historical document, the views are really vignettes presented from a remarkable variety of vantage points - aerial perspectives, multiple viewpoints, framed repoussoirs - and incorporate the natural beauty and atmospheric effects of every season: crisp autumn moonlight, cherry blossoms and irises in the spring, summer rain on the waterways, and temples in the winter snow. It is a tour de force of artistic vision and printmaking craftsmanship that epitomizes the inventiveness of ukiyo-e art." "The volume is printed in Japan and has been reproduced from an exceptionally fine, first-edition set in the Brooklyn Museum of Art to insure maximum fidelity to the original prints."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: "Third reprinting, with corrections, September 1999"--T.p. verso.

Plates reproduced from the series of prints in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, N.Y., accession number X648.1.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 256).