The official title for this work is "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road" - Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi - or simply Gyōsho Tōkaidō.
Hiroshige produced these prints eight years after, 1841 - 1844, his first horizontal Hoeidō edition published 1833-34, which is included for comparison.
These are very delightful large prints with a high attention to detail. The view points are different and sometimes quite surprising. Hiroshige experiments with various details to improve his landscapes.
Many themes in the Gyōsho Tōkaidō were explored by Hokusai some 40 years before, but given a fresh new look and often as an activity part of the landscapes.
It is possible to travel the same road today and some villages are still looking quite like they did back then, in 1601 - 1604. Utagawa Hiroshige (in Japanese: 歌川 広重), also called Andō Hiroshige (in Japanese: 安藤 広重;), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. He was born 1797 and died 12 October 1858.
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as "picture s] of the floating world".
Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which is the subject of this book, and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
The main subjects of his work are considered atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose focus was more on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period (1603-1868).
