White as snow? That is exactly what it looks like. In fact, it looks more like snow than almost any other picture. Utagawa Hiroshige's view of Shisaku shows three rocky promontories stretching out into a dark blue sea, each turned a flawless white by the soft petals descending from above, a snowfall that appears both completely still and yet mysteriously quick as it spirals in its measured patterns.
This truth about snow — weightless stasis at a distance, flutter close up — is what Hiroshige gets down so beautifully with his array of white marks descending from a blue-black band of sky. And yet his print is a marvelous lie. For each of the snowflakes, from sea level all the way up to heaven, is exactly equal in size.
You wouldn't see them this way in reality; in fact, you couldn't see this scene at all unless you had clambered to a peak so high the seascape lay like a carpet below and you weren't worried about imminent twilight. So this view must surely be fantasy — except that it has its truths and its perfect topographical clarity. Could it be reality exaggerated and simplified (and flattened) all at once or is it so stylized as to be practically modern?
That is what Western artists loved about Hiroshige's prints when they first flowed through Europe after the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853. Tilted space, flat planes, proleptic editing, absent shadows: painters from Degas to Cezanne learnt from these innovations. Cezanne papered the walls of Giverny with Japanese prints; Van Gogh made effortful copies of Hiroshige.
Effortful because Hiroshige's compositions are so weird that if you tried to put them together like jigsaws, Van Gogh's preferred method, the pieces would scarcely seem to fit. Take Plum Estate, Kameido: the foreground is filled with a large, dark tree obscuring the tiny figures admiring cherry blossom in the distance; this tree's blossoms are, in turn, partly obscured by the title of the print. On the left, a big notice, of all things, juts in at such an odd angle its words aren't legible; experts surmise it's a warning against vandalism.
Hiroshige once famously blocked a foreground with a horse's backside and one senses a quirky wit at play in his art. His powerful series, Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Highway, where Mount Fuji rises above the travelers like a think bubble: Fuji on the mind, proceeds like a road movie in freeze frame. The characters get closer and closer to the landmark, true subject of the series, and then abruptly pass it by.
But this selection of prints from the British Museum's superb collection, by artist Julian Opie, shows another side of Hiroshige from the popular street scenes or noodle bowls or visions of Fuji. By concentrating on the late works — all vertical, right against landscape convention — it makes you consider him with new eyes.
For Hiroshige's Famous Views, as they're known, could be famous for sheer spectacle alone: breathtaking gorges, miniature people attempting bridges above ravines of icy water, night skies blossoming with fireworks. They take you deep into Japan, from the bay in Toyama spanned by a hundred linked boats, a mariner stepping gingerly between them, to the Paired-Sword rocks of Satsuma rising like jagged blades out of waves drawn like tiny Fujis, upon which sightseers sway in perilous boats.
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