Andō Hiroshige IV

Andō Hiroshige IV (安藤広重四代, 1849–1925), born Kikuchi Kihei (菊地喜兵衛), was the fourth artist in the lineage of Utagawa Hiroshige, the great Edo-period landscape master whose name became one of the most influential brand identities in the history of Japanese printmaking. Working in the late Meiji and Taishō periods, he was responsible for sustaining the Hiroshige studio name into the twentieth century, producing prints in the established Hiroshige idiom — landscapes, bird-and-flower (kachō-e) compositions, and views of famous places — at a moment when the woodblock print industry was being radically transformed by photography, lithography, and the new shin-hanga movement.

He was born in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1849, only nine years before the death of the original Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858), and his career spans the entire arc of the Meiji modernization and the early Taishō era. The succession of the Hiroshige name had become a complex affair by the second half of the nineteenth century: Hiroshige II (Suzuki Chinpei, 1826–1869) had married Hiroshige I's daughter and inherited the studio; Hiroshige III (Andō Tokubei, 1842–1894), originally signing as Risshō, succeeded in turn after a marital and professional rift; and Kikuchi Kihei eventually emerged as the holder of the Hiroshige IV name in the early twentieth century, generally dated to his formal assumption of the gō around 1911 following Hiroshige III's death in 1894 and a long interregnum during which the studio's commercial position was uncertain.

Unlike his Edo-period predecessors, who had benefited from a thriving popular print market, Hiroshige IV worked in a Meiji and Taishō Japan in which the woodblock print no longer dominated mass visual culture. Newspapers, magazines, photographic postcards, and lithographic posters had displaced ukiyo-e prints as the principal medium for popular imagery, and the great Edo publishing houses had largely disappeared. The kabuki-driven yakusha-e tradition had collapsed in Tokyo by the 1890s, and the famous-place (meisho-e) tradition that had been the heart of the Hiroshige studio's output now competed directly with cheap photographic souvenirs of the same scenic sites. Hiroshige IV nonetheless continued to produce woodblock prints in the conservative Hiroshige manner — well after the artistic energy of the print medium had migrated to the shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga movements, whose practitioners (Kawase Hasui, Hashiguchi Goyō, Yoshida Hiroshi, Onchi Kōshirō) belong to a quite different lineage from the traditional Utagawa school.

His surviving body of work is relatively small compared with the great Edo masters of the Hiroshige name and includes landscape compositions self-consciously modelled on the famous Edo-period series — most notably re-editions and continuations of the Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji (Fuji Sanjūrokkei), originally conceived by Hiroshige I in 1858 — together with kachō-e prints depicting cranes, herons, and other birds in atmospheric weather conditions, and small-format meisho-e of well-known sights in and around Tokyo. His landscapes preserve the high horizons, atmospheric weather effects, and lyrical compositional restraint that had defined the Hiroshige idiom for three generations, even as the technical printing standards of the period grew more variable.