- The most extensive survey of Hiroshige's oeuvre in English to date - For the first time all textual content in Hiroshige's prints is transcribed and translated - Provides essential comparative material for every scholar, dealer, and collector Hiroshige. Nature and the City is the most extensive overview of the career of the famed Japanese print artist, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) in the English language to date. It is based on the largest collection of Hiroshige in private hands outside Japan, the Alan Medaugh collection. The catalogue consists of 500 entries, with an emphasis on urban and rural landscapes, fan prints and prints of birds and flowers. Grouped chronologically by subject, it presents Hiroshige's interpretation of the urban scenes from his hometown Edo (present-day Tokyo), the great series documenting travel along the famous highways of Japan, and the idylls of nature as represented in his bird-and flower prints. Hiroshige often incorporated poetry in his works and for the first time all textual content is transcribed and translated. Additionally, the catalogue pays due attention to the differences between variant editions of his prints. Thus, it provides essential comparative material for every scholar, dealer, and collector.
About the Author: Rhiannon Paget is the curator of Asian art at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Paget studied at Tokyo University of the Arts and received her doctorate in Japanese Art History from the University of Sydney, Australia. She has published research on Japanese woodblock prints, textiles, board games, and nihonga. Andreas Marks is the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He was director and chief curator at Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, in California, from 2008 until 2013. He has a PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a master's degree in East Asian Art History from the University of Bonn, Germany. He has curated exhibitions in a variety of media from pre-modern to contemporary art and visual culture at 35 museums including the Birmingham Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Honolulu Museum of Art, San Antonio Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art. In 2014 he received an award from the International Ukiyo-e Society in Japan for his research. John T. Carpenter is the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. From 1999 to 2011, he taught the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and served as head of the London office of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. He has published widely on Japanese art, especially in the areas of calligraphy, painting, and woodblock prints, and has helped organize numerous exhibitions at the Museum, including Designing Nature (2012-13); Brush Writing in the Arts of Japan (2013-14); Celebrating the Arts of Japan (2015-17), The Poetry of Nature (2018-2019), and The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated (2019). Shiho Sasaki is conservator of Asian paintings and paper at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Since 2008, she has been responsible for preserving and conserving the two-dimensional art collection at the museum. Previously, she conducted coloring and material research at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. She received her M.A. in paper conservation from the Royal College of Art, London.