Two Lovers

Two Lovers by Utagawa Hiroshige is a figural sheet in which the artist, most often celebrated for the landscape print, turns to the intimate world of Edo townspeople. Edo ukiyo-e regularly depicted lovers, courtesans, and chance encounters as part of its broader visual culture of the floating world, and although Hiroshige is not primarily classed as a figure designer in the Utamaro mold, he made a number of bijin and couple compositions throughout his career, often as small-format prints or as elements of larger sets. In Two Lovers the design centers on a man and woman caught in a moment of quiet attention -- a gesture, a glance, a shared umbrella or robe -- with the relationship sketched economically in posture and costume detail. Behind or around them, Hiroshige typically includes enough environmental detail (an interior post and beam, a glimpse of garden or street) to anchor the figures in a recognizable Edo world rather than an abstract space. The careful color, the use of textile pattern to differentiate the two figures, and the soft pictorial mood all reflect mid-nineteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e at the height of its sophistication. The Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift impression at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, indexed on ukiyo-e.org, broadens the picture of Hiroshige's output, reminding viewers that the master of the landscape print could also turn the same sensitivity of line and color toward the small dramas of human affection.