Online Paintings

Two difficult parts along the Nakasendō, Nagakubo flourished as a post down during the Edo period. As the town developed, its row houses eventually spread to side streets, giving it the rare shape of a key.

At its most flourishing time, there were over 45 inns in which travelers could rest, making it a rather large post town.Hiroshige largely confined himself in his early work to common Ukiyo-e themes such as women and actors.

Then, after the death of Toyohiro, Hiroshige made a impressive turnabout, with the 1831 landscape series Famous Views of the Eastern Capital which was critically highly praised for its composition and colors.

He dominated landscape printmaking with his unique brand of intimate, almost small-scale works compared against the older traditions of landscape painting descended from Chinese landscape painters such as Sesshu.

The travel prints generally depict travelers along famous routes experiencing the special attractions of various stops along the way. They travel in the rain, in snow, and during all of the seasons.

In 1856, working with the publisher Uoya Eikichi, he created a series of luxury edition prints, made with the finest printing techniques including true gradation of color, the addition of mica to lend a unique flickering effect, embossing, fabric printing, blind printing, and the use of glue printing .

One Hundred Famous Views of Edo was immensely popular. The set was published posthumously and some prints had not been completed — he had created over 100 on his own, but two were added by Hiroshige II after his death.