The Japanese painter and printmaker Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) is considered one of the six great masters of the Ukiyo-e school. He is most famous for his landscape prints, which render typically Japanese landscapes in their different moods in a very poetic manner.

Working during the closing decades of the Edo period, Hiroshige represents the last flowering of the Ukiyo-e school. After his death, the designs of the prints became ever more vulgar, the printing careless, and the colors garish. In fact, a few years before Hiroshige's death, Commodore Perry arrived with his famous "black ships" to break Japan's centuries-old seclusion, and the end of traditional Japanese art and culture was in sight.

Hiroshige was the son of a fire brigade chief in Edo (modern Tokyo). At the age of 14, he became a pupil of Utagawa Toyohiro, a well-known printmaker, and he also studied traditional Japanese painting. Hiroshige's early...