Edo Hyaku Talk Series, Part III: HIROSHIGE, EDO ARTIST

Talk and slide presentation about the woodblock prints from Hiroshige’s Edo Hyaku, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series.

Coinciding with the exhibition Landmarks From Before It Was Called Tokyo: Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

By Carol Dorman, Stuart Jackson Gallery, Toronto

Admission free, Reservation required

Monday, April 8, 2019, 6:30-8:00 P.M.

Edo Hyaku Talk Part III: Hiroshige, Edo Artist

Hiroshige was a son of Edo, truly one of the most remarkable cities that ever existed.  Edo’s unique culture provided fertile ground for all manner of arts to flourish and for the growth of some of Japan’s most famous artists.   In many ways Hiroshige’s career path was typical for the time until his lyrical and sometimes breathtaking 1833-34 series of The 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō proved to be a best-seller.  That series established him as a master of the genre and he continued to produce popular landscape series through the rest of his career.  He achieved a lasting relevance because of the beauty, novelty and variety of his compositions, but also through his choice of subject matter.  More than any other artist of the time, Hiroshige showed us his world:  the countryside, the cities, and their inhabitants.  His monumental Edo Hyaku series is a portrait of the seasons, the moods, the variety and the beauty of that city – Hiroshige’s city.

Carol Dorman has been an associate at the Stuart Jackson Gallery, specializing in antique Japanese prints (ukiyo-e), for over 20 years.  Ms. Dorman has lectured on ukiyo-e to various groups in Ontario and Quebec and most recently at the University of Delhi, India.  She has curated and been involved in print exhibitions at the Japan Foundation, the Gardiner Museum, and the Stuart Jackson Gallery and in 2018 she began teaching classes in Japanese art and culture through Ryerson’s Life Institute.  Ms. Dorman became interested in Japanese art at university and began collecting ukiyo-e prints while completing a Master of Arts degree in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto.