Detail from The Canal, Amsterdam, 1889, James McNeill Whistler, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

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Ando Hiroshige

Nationality: Japanese
Date of birth: 1797
Place of birth: Edo (now Tokio)
Date of death: 1858
Place of death: Yedo
Category: painter

Identity:

Ando Hiroshige was a painter of landscape and an important ukiyoe print-maker.

Life:

His work was admired and collected by Whistler. In Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl y052, the model, Joanna Hiffernan, holds a woodcut fan, The Banks of the Sumida River from the set of Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, dating from 1857.

In Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen y060, several prints by Hiroshige, including his 1855 colour woodcut Saijo, Iyo Province from Views of Famous Places in the 60-odd Provinces, are being admired by the model.

His prints inspired such paintings as Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge y140, which Theodore Child compared to Hiroshige's woodcut of a fête on a river at night, with fireworks, Moonlight at Ryogoko of 1856/1857. Other examples of compositions dominated by the curve of a bridge are, for example, Clear Morning after a Snowfall at Nihonbashu Bridge (Nihonbashu yukibare no asa) from the Hundred Views of Famous Places of Edo, and Plates 39 and 53 from the Fifty-three Views of the Tokaido.

Bibliography:

The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, ed. L. Macy. MacDonald, Margaret F., Susan Galassi, Aileen Ribeiro, and Patricia de Montfort, Whistler, Women and Fashion, New Haven and London, 2003 .