Memorial portrait of Utagawa Hiroshige

Memorial portrait of Utagawa Hiroshige, recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago with a date of 1858, marks one of the most poignant moments in the late history of Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e): the commemoration of the great landscape designer Utagawa Hiroshige, who died in the cholera epidemic of 1858. The print, produced under the Utagawa Toyokuni name, depicts Hiroshige in the conventions of a shini-e or memorial portrait, where a recently deceased figure is shown in formal robes, often with poetic verse or biographical text framing the image. As Edo ukiyo-e, the work belongs to a long tradition of shini-e for actors, poets, and now fellow print designers, in which the cheap and widely circulated medium of the woodblock print performed the public work of mourning. The image draws on the visual vocabulary of [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) and portrait prints, applying it to a colleague within the Utagawa school. The fact that a Toyokuni-line designer was the natural choice to commemorate Hiroshige underscores the depth of the network that bound the school together across genres. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the sheet as a key document of late Edo print culture, in which Utagawa Toyokuni's name continued to authorize images at the heart of the school's communal life, and in which the wider public could share, however modestly, in the memorial of one of the era's most beloved artists.