Along the Eastern Sea Road: Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Exhibition Website

Oct 12 2018 - Feb 17 2019

Cameron Art Museum

Wilmington, NC

Master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō is among the most celebrated works of Japanese art. This series depicts the spectacular landscapes and fascinating characters encountered on the journey from Edo (now Tokyo) to the imperial capital of Kyoto. The Tōkaidō road was the most-traveled route between these two important cities, figuring heavily into popular Japanese art and culture in the mid-1800s. Cameron Art Museum presents the complete set of 55 prints from Hiroshige’s monumental oban series, known as the Upright Tōkaidō, created in 1855.

In 1995, Dr. Isabel Bittinger (Winston-Salem, NC) presented a gift of 108 Japanese ukiyo-e color woodblock prints to the Cameron Art Museum. The prints were bound in an album and included two series: Tōkaidō gojusan-tsugi (Fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō) by Andō Hiroshige and Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), attributed to Utagawa Kunisada II. This extraordinary album remained in Dr. Bittinger’s family and was originally owned by Reverend Edmund Bittinger, a Presbyterian chaplain who traveled with Commodore Matthew Perry aboard the Susquehanna, on the historic 1853-54 inaugural U.S. naval entry into Japan.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Works on Paper
  • Asian
  • 19th Century
  • Japanese
  • Utagawa Hiroshige

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