Utagawa Hiroshige, Kasumigaseki Nokei Woodcut, 1840

Kasumigaseki Nokei is a polychrome woodblock print (nishiki-e, ink and colour on paper) by Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858). This plate is from the print suite Famous Places of Edo, designed around 1840. Signed on plate and in a cartouche “Hiroshige ga”???. With the marks of the Censor's seal: kiwame ??:? Horizontal Oban. In fair condition, with vivid colors, this plate has some visible aging signs (yellowing of the paper, discolorations). Although some thinner areas and a lack on the higher left margin of the sheet, this ukiyo-e print has preserved still today its beauty and charme. Collect this superb ukiyo-e, depicting a pleasant urban Asian landscape, to embellish your house with a sophisticated Oriental touch! Utagawa Hiroshige (Japan, 1797-1858) Born Ando Hiroshige, Hiroshige was the best known Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Remembered for his horizontal-format landscape series, the obans of the print series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The subjects of his work were atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period (1603–1868). The Hiroshige's death marked the beginning of a rapid decline in the ukiyo-e genre, especially in the face of the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the Hiroshige trends returned under the name of “Japonism” on Western European painting towards the close of the 19th century. Famous artrtists, such as Manet and Monet, collected and closely studied Hiroshige's compositions.