But it is another kind of sighting, beyond armchair travel, that seems to be at the heart of late Hiroshige. There is that wonderful Japanese tradition of ritualized viewing — one of his prints shows a “moon viewing point” — but Hiroshige takes the little dramas of twilight or geese against a winter sun further into the realms of depiction.
Some of his prints are exceptionally inventive when it comes to describing the way we see the world, near and far. Yachts on a wide sea are shown as tiny, white rectangles, entirely outlined in black except for the lower edge, implying the dissolution of objects immersed in water. The tide as it froths up the beach is just a band of white edged with tiny black hyphens like hemstitch, somehow suggesting motion as well as definition.
And the same marks turned vertical, like exclamation marks, describe rice plants in water, each paddy field reflecting the moon, over and again, in its surface. And then the lines elongate into needle-sharp striations running almost the length of the scene; not quite the action of a downpour, with its million of separate drops, but very much how it looks and feels.
Haze and haar, snowfall and mist: Hiroshige's weather lies on and in the scene like some strange, non-naturalistic lighting effect. An artist for all seasons, his works are almost superfluously dated by the lunar month, since one can generally go by the details — spring blossom, harvest moons — but the atmospherics are much more intangible. One sees that a salt beach gets some of its crystal whiteness from a tincture of the sea's blue, but not how its waterlogged softness is implied. And moonlight, casting eerily pale shadows, pervades the scene less like light than ether.
Hiroshige used the bokashi technique — wiping ink from the block before printing — like nobody else, getting radiant cross-fading effects of sea into sky, dark into dawn, air into moisture; you can see how much Whistler's Nocturnes borrow from him. And yet, as Opie says, he also takes your eye through a landscape, up hill and down dale and across gorges, with the hyper-precision of a computer-game landscape. It is a strange combination, but then it is always hard to catch Hiroshige's character as an artist. Less sublime than Hokusai, less sensual than Utamaro and determinedly demotic at one stage (the government fixed his prices low so more people could buy them), he does seem to pass into a new and more radical purity in later life.
The foreground vanishes to free the immensity of distance. People grow smaller, skies higher until they meet the dark imperium of outer space. By the time you get to the final Snow, Moon and Flowers series, humanity has vanished and nature takes over. Snow rises to the sky, whirlpools are drawn like flowers and one feels imagination has taken over and the prints aspire to the concision of haiku. Wave-blossoms as snow to water and blooming out of season: it could have been written for Hiroshige's whirlpools.
RSS