Tōkaidō gojo santsugi. Shimada. Plate No 24. From the series: Fifty-three stations of the Tokaido Road.

Utagawa (Andō) Hiroshige (1797-1858), was a renowned painter and print artist, who old-time authorities still hail as the last of the great Japanese print masters, surely short-changing his brilliant contemporaries Kuniyoshi and Kunisada, not to mention later artists, notably Yoshitoshi. A son of an official in the fire department, he was a pupil of Utagawa Toyohiro and also studied with Okajima Rinsai and Ooka Umpo. In the 1820s he was active in many areas: actor prints, warrior prints, prints of women, and more. He started producing landscape prints in the early 1830s, establishing his own unique style with the series Famous Places in Edo and Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Highway by the end of the decade. Several prints of  the latter series are in Te Papa's collection. He continued to excel at views of famous places throughout his career and managed to express in great detail the poetic sensibility inherent in the climate and topography of Japan and the people who lived there. Hiroshige also designed many masterpieces in the genre of bird and flower prints, once again creating a world where poetry and painting combined.

The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojo santsugi) is a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by Utagawa Hiroshige after his first travel along the Tōkaidō in 1832. The Tōkaidō road, linking the shōgun's capital Edo (present-day Tokyo) to the imperial one, Kyōto, was the main travel and transport artery of old Japan. It is also the most important of the "Five Roads" (Gokaidō)—the five major roads of Japan created or developed during the Edo period (1603-1868) to further strengthen the control of the central shogunate administration over the whole country.

Even though the first Hōeidō edition of the series (1833-34) is by far the best known, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō was such a popular subject that it led Hiroshige to create some 30 different series of woodcut prints on it, all very different one from the other by their size (ōban or the smaller chūban), their designs or even their number (some series include just a few prints).  Te Papa's holdings are believed to be 'lifetime' editions, and follow the horizontal chūban format. 

The Hōeidō edition of the Tōkaidō is Hiroshige's best known work, and the one of the best selling editions of ukiyo-e. Coming just after Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, it established this new major theme of ukiyo-e, the landscape print or fūkei-ga, with a special focus on "famous views" (meisho). These landscape prints took full advantage of the new possibilities offered by the Western representation of perspective, which Japanese artists had by now fully assimilated. Hiroshige's series was very successful, not only in Japan, but later in Western countries. The series is known as the Kyoka Tokaido, after the kyōka (crazy verse) included in each print. It is also known as the Sanoki Tōkaidō, after the publisher of the series.

This print is plate 24 of the series and depicts a daimyō procession crossing the river at Shimada; in the foreground, to right, two great litters are carried by a host of topless porters. Beyond, low hills rise above the mist, and the outline of Mt Fuji is seen far away towards the left.

Sources:

British Museum, 'Utagawa Hiroshige (Biographical details)', https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=147828

Wikipedia, 'The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifty-three_Stations_of_the_T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   May 2019