Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826-1869)
Introduction
Hiroshige II (1826-1869, 二代 広重,
although he wrote it with the characters 廣重),
also known
as Shigenobu (重宣) and
Risshō (立祥), was a
Japanese woodblock print
(ukiyo-e)
artist. He was the chief student of the great master
Hiroshige.
This site provides a partial online catalogue raisonné of
his entire output; it contains his principal series, mostly complete.
A page containing a list of his series, with links to pages for each series
we have a page for, can be found
here.
NOTE:
This site is not intended to be an extremely high-quality
resource. It is mostly simply a lot of images that were collected while
trying to sort out some Hiroshige II prints. They have been put them online
as a resource for other woodblock print people, but Hiroshige II is not
really my main focus (I'm very busy doing a
Catalog Raisonné of Yoshitoshi)
so it is hoped that some Hiroshige II aficionado will volunteer to take it over!
One consequence of that is that much of the data here (e.g. titles of
individual prints, translations of titles, prints dates, etc) has
not been independently checked for correctness; rather, this site
often simply repeats information from other sources. So, please take all
information on this site with a grain of salt.
I will, of course, happily correct any errors pointed out. Also, if anyone
has images any of the missing prints, I would be happy to add them. (If you
come here to identify a print, and it's not here, it's missing, and I would
appreciate a scan of it, so that I can identify it, and add it.)
Another consequence is that I didn't bother with individual prints, triptychs,
etc; just the series. If you'd like to add them, please
contact me.
Confusion between Hiroshige II and Hiroshige III
One often sees prints with titles with
"Tōkyō"
(東京) in them, signed "Hiroshige", and
attributed to Hiroshige II. This is almost guaranteed to be incorrect. The
reason is that
Edo
was only renamed "Tōkyō" in 1868, and that new name was
never used before that - and Hiroshige II had stopped signing prints
with 'Hiroshige' in 1865 (changing his
go
to 'Risshō'). So if you have a print that is signed 'Hiroshige', and the
title contains 'Tōkyō' - it's almost certainly a Hiroshige III
print, and not a Hiroshige II print.
The Prints
We currently have the prints indexed only by date order:
The table does contain other information about the series, such as size,
orientation, etc.
In addition, to help those who do not know much about Japanese prints, and
merely want to identify a print which they have been told is by Hiroshige II,
we now have a new tool, a page which shows a sample print from each of his
series. If the print is from one of Hiroshige II's series, they can use this
page to quickly locate the series their print is from:
Additional Material
Helping Out
If you have a print (or an image of one) which we do not yet have, or a print
(or an image of one) where we currently have a poor image (some of our images
are small black-and-white illustrations gleaned from dealer catalogues, etc),
we (and other people interested in Hiroshige II) would really appreciate it
if you could provide us with a high-quality image for the site.
Instructions on how to provide print images, and to reach us, are below:
Other
Web Links
Hiroshige II prints in online collections
Other Hiroshige II links
Recommended General Woodblock Sites
Catalogue Raisonnés for Other Woodblock Artists
© Copyright 2009-2011 by J. Noel Chiappa
Last updated: 18/May/2011