Utagawa Hiroshige

In 1832 Hiroshige joined an official procession traveling the Tokaido, the road linking Edo, the shogun's capital, with the imperial capital Kyoto, roughly 300 miles of post towns and mountain passes. He sketched the stations along the way, and the woodblock print series that came out of the trip, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, sold in numbers no earlier ukiyo-e series had reached, catching rain, snow, and travelers at each stop with a specificity the genre hadn't attempted before.

Hiroshige had been training under the print master Toyohiro since he was orphaned at around 12, following his father into the low-ranking post of a fire warden before giving it up for painting. He kept producing landscape series for the rest of his career, most famously One Hundred Famous Views of Edo late in life.

Those prints later crossed an ocean and reshaped European painting. Vincent van Gogh collected them in Paris, copied at least two of the Edo views directly in oil, and wrote that his own work was founded on Japanese art. Hiroshige never knew that. He died in Edo in 1858, during a cholera epidemic that killed tens of thousands in the city that same year.