A journey through a winter landscape changed everything for Japan’s master landscape artist, Utagawa Hiroshige. Tim Richardson catches his drift

You are walking through a snowstorm… Everything around you is transformed… Watch your footing! It’s slippery… And all the while, cold snowflakes are falling on your face… Even into your mouth… It’s as if you’ve become part of nature… Absorbed into it… After all, if you fall into that drift, you may never get out…

Few things evoke midwinter quite as potently as falling snow. But it has proven a challenge for artists to depict convincingly. In oil paint, even in the work of an artist of Monet’s calibre, snow can look like ice cream, though the medium does provide the opportunity to reveal all the colours contained within it. In watercolour, snow can come across as insipid and nothingy. The woodblock print is perhaps the best technique for depicting snow, since the power of the line can circumscribe its qualities more clearly, capturing its apparent solidity while also hinting at its softness and transience.

It was the Japanese who became masters of the woodblock, and of snow scenes, in the 18th and 19th century. The prints produced in Japan in the Edo period are known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, a Buddhist concept that refers to life as a realm of sorrows from which escape must be sought. Latterly the concept took on a more positive spin, referring to a world of earthly pleasures – something to be sought out rather than transcended. Artists aimed to capture these fleeting sensations through an appreciation of the natural world as well as via human interactions, pursuing themes such as feminine beauty, the dignity of labour, the admiration of actors and warriors, and the excitement of erotic encounters.

The master of the masters was Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), the greatest of all Japanese landscape artists. The son of a low-ranking samurai, and orphaned by the age of 12, Hiroshige initially struggled to make his way in the world. Until his early thirties he was turning out formulaic portrait images of famous warlords and courtesans to suit popular taste. But in 1832 his life changed when he was given the opportunity to travel along the celebrated Tōkaidō (Eastern Coast Road), which ran for 300 miles along the south of Japan’s main island of Honshū. Travellers and pilgrims would form social groups to make the journey, which linked the Tokugawa shogun’s military base at Edo (the former name of Tokyo) with the emperor’s city of Kyoto, taking in 53 “stations” – stops or viewpoints – on the way.

This was a busy, state-of-the-art road: walkers would marvel at how wide and smooth it was, and at how well-engineered the numerous mountain passes were. Yet to the hitherto sheltered Hiroshige this was clearly still “the wild”: an exciting and novel place that inspired him to depict the scenes he experienced with great vigour and compositional acuity. Contemporaries commented on how realistic Hiroshige’s renditions were – “as if the scene was actually in front of you” – which may have been because he was constantly sketching. Some of these sketchbooks survive, showing episodes such as drinking binges among fellow travellers, or the time a samurai demonstrated to the young artist the art of drawing a sword quickly from a seated position. The whole experience led to Hiroshige’s first “hit”, his bestselling series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road (1833-34). Hiroshige was never rich and had to churn out more than 5,000 prints in his lifetime to survive, but it was this project that secured his lasting reputation, leading to a number of other bestselling series of landscape views.

Hiroshige’s skill lay not just in truth to landscape or in compositions full of movement, but in the way he could depict, with uncanny feeling, different weather conditions such as rain, wind and snow – not just in terms of colour and line, but somehow in the tonal atmosphere of the entire scene. Often it’s the postures of the human figures in his pictures that imply this – as they crouch down in driving wind, hurry across bridges in rain, or methodically trudge through deep snow. His scenes often capture travellers in the act of traversing difficult terrain in harsh conditions. You can almost hear the soft crunch or squeak of the snow as they tread through silent valleys under steep mountains, dreaming of the roadside inn where hot food and drink awaits, and where tales of the day can be recounted.

So what of Hokusai (1760-1849), the most famous of the Japanese ukiyo-e artists? His landscape scenes were rather different to Hiroshige’s in tone, in that he preferred a more graphic style, often capturing the grandeur of nature in the raw. Hokusai was trying to elicit a strong emotional reaction in the awed viewer, rather than evoking a specific place. Hiroshige’s landscape scenes are quieter, with a gentler and subtler colour palette, including many gradations; this was achieved by means of an innovative yet time-consuming printing technique called bokashi.

One of Hiroshige’s greatest snow scenes is Travellers in the Snow at Oi (c 1835-37), pictured above. In this scene (from the series Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kiso Road, a “high road” route between Edo and Kyoto) the viewer becomes almost part of the travelling party because the perspective is so low and the thrust out towards the viewer, formed by the figures, so strident. The use of perspective was a Western technique adopted by Hiroshige. Only rarely did he include large human figures in compositions, as here, depicting two travellers, possibly a man and a woman, both on horseback with servants on foot, though none of their faces are visible. The snow here is falling thick and fast, and there’s a potent sense of wilderness, with looming mountains and the massive trunks of the pine trees that frame the scene. Hiroshige’s colour palette is almost monochrome, with powerful strokes of black and grey on the bark of the trees, in the shadows under the mountains and in a dark band in the foreground. There is a slight sense of wintry foreboding, though this small group seems well-prepared, as if they have travelled the route before.

This is an abridged version of an article from Idler #106.

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