'Moonlight View of Takanawa',
	1859 - Publisher: Sanoya Kihei (Sanoki, Kikakudō)

Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826-1869)




Introduction

Hiroshige II (1826-1869, 二代 広重, although he wrote it with the characters 廣重), also known as Shigenobu (重宣) and Risshō (立祥), was a Japanese woodblock print (ukiyo-e) artist. He was the chief student of the great master Hiroshige.

This site provides a partial online catalogue raisonné of his entire output; it contains his principal series, mostly complete. A page containing a list of his series, with links to pages for each series we have a page for, can be found here.



NOTE:

This site is not intended to be an extremely high-quality resource. It is mostly simply a lot of images that were collected while trying to sort out some Hiroshige II prints. They have been put them online as a resource for other woodblock print people, but Hiroshige II is not really my main focus (I'm very busy doing a Catalog Raisonné of Yoshitoshi) so it is hoped that some Hiroshige II aficionado will volunteer to take it over!

One consequence of that is that much of the data here (e.g. titles of individual prints, translations of titles, prints dates, etc) has not been independently checked for correctness; rather, this site often simply repeats information from other sources. So, please take all information on this site with a grain of salt.

I will, of course, happily correct any errors pointed out. Also, if anyone has images any of the missing prints, I would be happy to add them. (If you come here to identify a print, and it's not here, it's missing, and I would appreciate a scan of it, so that I can identify it, and add it.)

Another consequence is that I didn't bother with individual prints, triptychs, etc; just the series. If you'd like to add them, please contact me.



Confusion between Hiroshige II and Hiroshige III

One often sees prints with titles with "Tōkyō" (東京) in them, signed "Hiroshige", and attributed to Hiroshige II. This is almost guaranteed to be incorrect. The reason is that Edo was only renamed "Tōkyō" in 1868, and that new name was never used before that - and Hiroshige II had stopped signing prints with 'Hiroshige' in 1865 (changing his go to 'Risshō'). So if you have a print that is signed 'Hiroshige', and the title contains 'Tōkyō' - it's almost certainly a Hiroshige III print, and not a Hiroshige II print.

The Prints

We currently have the prints indexed only by date order: The table does contain other information about the series, such as size, orientation, etc.

In addition, to help those who do not know much about Japanese prints, and merely want to identify a print which they have been told is by Hiroshige II, we now have a new tool, a page which shows a sample print from each of his series. If the print is from one of Hiroshige II's series, they can use this page to quickly locate the series their print is from:



Additional Material



Helping Out

If you have a print (or an image of one) which we do not yet have, or a print (or an image of one) where we currently have a poor image (some of our images are small black-and-white illustrations gleaned from dealer catalogues, etc), we (and other people interested in Hiroshige II) would really appreciate it if you could provide us with a high-quality image for the site.

Instructions on how to provide print images, and to reach us, are below:



Other


Web Links

Hiroshige II prints in online collections

Other Hiroshige II links

Recommended General Woodblock Sites

Catalogue Raisonnés for Other Woodblock Artists


© Copyright 2009-2011 by J. Noel Chiappa

Last updated: 18/May/2011