Stunning vistas RISD showcases Hiroshige’s prints BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

As small museums in this country go, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art is a jewel box. The Japanese Prints Gallery, near its popular Dainichi Buddha, is easily overlooked, and right now it’s holding a gem of a little exhibition through August 21.

In "The Journey to Kyoto: Sights Along the Eastern Sea Route," 18 first-edition prints have been drawn from Hiroshige’s "Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido," a landscape series as beautiful — and sometimes as whimsical — as it is historically significant.

Period woodblock prints from the museum’s permanent collection are shown in this small room on a rotating basis. The gallery is dedicated to showing ukiyoe, "Pictures of the Floating World."

The best examples of these genre images remain visually compelling to this day. For example, Katsushika Hokusai’s "Great Wave Off Kanagawa" — a mountain of water reaching down like a claw — is as much a Western icon (even in post-modernist cribbing) as a Japanese one.

On display in the RISD exhibition is a dynamic compositional eye that directly influenced such prominent Western painters as van Gogh, Degas, and even Whistler, as well as several others.

"They’re just spectacular — they’re Hiroshige’s first great compositions," said Deborah Del Gais, curator of Asian art at the museum. "They’re very mood-filled, beautiful landscapes. Like this one — this is one of my favorites in the set."

She stepped over to the print depicting the "Night-Weeping Stone" at Nissaka. In the middle of a wide path, travelers group around a boulder that legend says houses the spirit of a pregnant woman murdered there. What impresses us more, even if we read the explanatory wall card, is how the artist guides our eyes to the stone at the lower middle, from the path that sweeps down from the mountain at the right to the middle-distance hills that stand at the left. Unlike Hokusai’s bold lines, Hiroshige’s are delicate, which allow finer details, even facial expressions in small figures.

The artist also shows a sense of humor in these genre paintings, which didn’t hurt their popularity. In one here, among field workers huddled around an early morning fire is a man who has hiked up his tunic to warm his bare rump. Another in the Tokaido series, not on display here, shows a man in a hurricane wind chasing his hat that is wheeling down a pier.

Ando Hiroshige — sometimes he signed his work Utagawa Hiroshige, to honor his teacher — was the most skilled and most popular landscape artist of his time, hands down. And he found his visual voice when creating this Tokaido Road series in 1833, after the 36-year-old accompanied an official government delegation and made sketches daily at each of the well-known stops.

"These really put Hiroshige on the map," said Del Gais. "After he made that journey he came back and made his first great landscape designs. In a way, you can see them almost as an answer to Hokusai, because Hokusai is issuing the great Mt. Fuji series in the late ’20s and the early ’30s.

"These are jumping into a totally new subject area," she continued. "Hokusai does wonderful landscapes beginning around 1800. But you don’t see them catching on commercially to the extent that those two series do. So this is a really critical turning point."

Selling with unprecedented success, these were the postcards of the time, for people who could not afford to travel but could buy an inexpensive print. But perhaps candid photographs are a better comparison. European genre painters were exploring the charm of domestic scenes in the early 19th century, but Japanese subject matter had tended to be formal. Hiroshige could capture everyday life freshly enough to put viewers there. Awe-inspiring mountain vistas were all very well, but he would also share the charm or humor of ordinary sights, such as a palanquin passenger hanging on for dear life as his four bearers trot rather than walk; travelers enjoying bowls of hot yam soup, a regional specialty; a passerby being yanked toward a teahouse by an aggressive servant.

But scenic views and vistas were the main offering of this series. Informative wall cards give us a sense of what they were seeing at the time: mountains rise above a river as porters carry well-dressed women across; weary travelers nap as their ferry crosses tranquil water; a workman on a scaffold shares our view of a bridge before the castle town of Yoshida.

Sometimes the woodblock prints on display in this RISD gallery are too decorative for modern tastes or too culture-specific for wider appreciation. But these masterworks by Hiroshige are as easy to appreciate as cherry blossom time.