 In the west, he is usually called merely Hiroshige Ando, although in Japan he was born Ando Tokutaro and, orphaned, later took the name of his painting teacher, calling himself Utagawa Hiroshige. In the half century and more of his painting lifetime, Hiroshige lived to see the traditional, isolated Japanese life of centuries begin to change through exposure to the West, the advent of steamboats and technology, and the drive to modernization of an essentially isolated culture. Admiral Perry and his fleet forcibly opened Japan to the West only in 1853, in the last years of Hiroshige's life. However, when he died in October, 1858, these changes were already beginning to take place and his last works seem, in hindsight, a nostalgic preservation of pre-Industrial Japan.
Hiroshige's father was of good but minor family and a hereditary retainer of the Shogun. He lived with the family in barracks attached to the Edo Palace in Edo (Tokyo), where Hiroshige was born in 1797. The position was hereditary, and the young Hiroshige was trained by his father as a fireman, although apparently the position was more to oversee the lower workers in the barracks who actually fought fires, than to risk danger himself. When Hiroshige was 12, both his parents died. While the orphaned boy took on his father's position as firefighter, he had always been interested in art and was able to join a prestigious Edo painting school, the then-famous Utagawa painting school in Edo. After he joined the school in 1811, Hiroshige asked to take the name of the ukiyo-e master, Utagawa Toyohiro, so that he was known as Utagawa Hiroshige.
Other biographies suggest that Hiroshige was deeply influenced by his older contemporary and rival, Katsushika Hokusai. Hokusai also did many series of landscape paintings: some suggest that it was the rivalry with Hokusai's work (he was also based in Edo) that first brought Hiroshige to landscape art. They were rivals during their lifetimes.
For the first 15 years of his career, Hiroshige followed the teachings of his master, Toyohiro Utagawa, and apparently confined his illustrations to books; lovely Japanese ladies, the occasional warrior, and Kabuki actors. In the traditional manner of the past two centuresi, Ukiyo-e (???, Ukiyo-e?), "pictures of the floating world", was a genre of Japanese woodblock prints (or woodcuts) and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, the theatre and pleasure quarters. At first, this tradition was usually mono-color, but in the century before Hiroshige, it became more and more common to color in the woodblock prints with color.
The popularity of woodblock and other mass-production techniques revolutionized the ability of the average Japanese household to display art. From being an almost entirely court-related industry, Hiroshige lived in a period when great popular artists and increased competition led to a revolution in artistic support. Part of his mammoth production over the lifetime of his career can be seen in the simple fact that tens of thousands could now afford, and were delighted to display, the artists of Nippon.
After 1830, Hiroshige became interested in painting landscapes - a somewhat neglected art form at the time. More, he began choosing a location and then making print after print showing that single city or location from multiple views, in multiple seasons, with people or without, so that his greatest works are great panoramas of Japan in the early 19th century. Some of his great series include The 53 Stations of the Tokaido(a coastal highway connecting Edo and Kyoto), 36 Views of Mt. Fuji, Sixty-odd Famous Places in the Provinces, and his magnificent Meisho Edo Hyakkei, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, one of his last and best efforts.
 Ukiyo-e were affordable because they could be mass-produced, and like any rule of mass production, the more they were seen, the more popular they were, the more demand there was for them. Hiroshige was a well-known painter in Japan but his exquisite woodblock prints were also extremely collectible and, in the era of Japanese exploration by the west, his prints became hugely popular in Britain and other western nations.
Some artists feel that Hiroshige's astonishing output resulted in a lowering of quality in his later years, although the Edo prints also date from later in his life.
Two years before his death, Hiroshige retired from the world, becoming a Buddhist monk, although he continued painting. He began his famous One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It is not known how he died at age 62, although there was a cholera epidemic in Edo that same year. He was buried in a Zen Buddhist temple in Asakusa.
His works were popular in his own time and are now considered some of the greatest landscape paintings from Japan from the flourishing schools of the 19th century.
SOURCES: Wikipedia: Ando Hiroshige
Artelino: Hiroshige
Brooklyn Museum of Art: Exhibition
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