Wednesday, January 23, 2019

One Hundred Views of Edo


Utagawa Hiroshige was one of Japan's finest ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) artists. Hiroshige is probably most well-known for his series of woodcut prints, such as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces.

You can view some of the views from these three series of prints on the Ukiyo-e Map. This interactive map has placed each Hiroshige print on the actual location depicted in Hiroshige's landscapes. If you select a marker on the map the image will open in a new tab or window. It is a shame that the images don't open in their own information window on the map. However Hiroshige's brilliance makes it worth the effort of switching between different tabs in your browser.

If you want to view some of Hiroshige's work in more detail the Chester Beatty Digtial Collections and the Wellcome Collection both own some of Hiroshige's woodcut prints which you can explore using their respective iiif viewers.


Geo-tagging and mapping artworks is an old idea. Perhaps the best example of an art map is the Tate's Artmaps, an interactive map showing 23,000 works of art in its collection. All the mapped artworks are associated with a specific location, either through information in the work's title, in its description or as depicted in the artwork itself.

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