Van Gogh’s love of Hiroshige, the Japanese master of the landscape, will be reflected in a British Museum exhibition

The British Museum’s exhibition on the Japanese master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) will include Van Gogh’s own copy of a print which he used in a painting in homage.

Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road (1 May-7 September) is to showcase the work of one of the 19th-century’s greatest Japanese artists, with over 100 prints (many from the American collector Alan Medaugh). Although Van Gogh plays a secondary role in the London exhibition, the British Museum has secured rare loans which emphasise how Japanese art inspired avant-garde European artists.

It was while Van Gogh was living in Paris in 1886-88 that he discovered Japanese art, buying over 600 prints from the dealer Siegfried Bing. Most of these survive at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and they include no fewer than 78 by Hiroshige.

Van Gogh’s tribute to Hiroshige is expressed most dramatically in two paintings that were based on the Japanese artist's prints. The first was inspired by Hiroshige’s The Plum Garden at Kameido (1857), an early morning view of blossom in a district in Edo (now Tokyo).

Van Gogh’s copy of the print of The Plum Garden at Kameido will be on display in the British Museum exhibition, on loan from Amsterdam. The Dutch artist’s own copies of Japanese prints are only very occasionally lent by the Van Gogh Museum, for conservation reasons, and this particular one has been loaned only once, when it went to Hamburg in 2002. 

Van Gogh’s copy of Hiroshige’s print has long ago faded, but this reflects the fact that during the Dutchman's time in Paris Japanese prints were inexpensive and treated casually. Van Gogh paid an average of 15 centimes—the French currency of the time—per print, not much more than the price of a coffee. Copies of The Plum Garden at Kameido typically now sell for around £50,000.

Having acquired a copy of the print, Van Gogh made a tracing of the composition. He then squared it up, enlarging it slightly for his painting. This tracing is also coming to the British Museum.

In his painting, Van Gogh diverged from Hiroshige’s composition by adding two prominent vertical strips of Japanese characters on the sides. These are real Japanese words, but taken from other prints and are unrelated to the garden scene. Van Gogh presumably added them to emphasise that it was a Japanese-inspired work.

It should come as no surprise that Van Gogh chose to depict a blossom scene, since they are common in Japanese art and he himself loved flowering trees in spring. Soon after his move to Arles, in early 1888, he made more than a dozen paintings of fruit blossom.

Van Gogh’s other painting directly inspired by Japanese art was based on Sudden Shower over Ohashi and Atake (1857), another Edo view. Hiroshige has depicted the riverscape from three viewpoints: looking down at the bridge, across to the opposite shore and up to the dark clouds.

The resulting painting by Van Gogh, Bridge in the Rain (October-November 1887), also has a border with Japanese characters. This frame-like device, in red and green, is in complementary colours which Van Gogh loved to use. Unfortunately neither of the Van Gogh paintings based on Hiroshige prints were available for the British Museum exhibition (they were last lent outside Amsterdam around 35 years ago).

The inspiration continued after Van Gogh left Paris. He was probably thinking of Hiroshige’s streaks of falling water when be made one of his last paintings, Rain - Auvers (July 1890).

Hiroshige prints also feature in Van Gogh’s portraits of Père Julien Tanguy, a friend in Paris who sold paint supplies. All the works in the background of the painting are Japanese images. The blossom scene in the upper-right corner is Hiroshige's Ishiyakushi: The Yoshitsune Cherry Tree near the Noriyori Shrine (1855). The upper centre image of Mount Fuji is an amalgam of two Hiroshige prints: Yoshiwara: The Field of Floating Islands in the Fuji Marsh (1855), with its flock of birds, and The Sagami River (1858). Van Gogh owned copies of all three prints. In a drawing of Tanguy (October-December 1887), a Mount Fuji scene appears in the background.

The British Museum exhibition will include one of Van Gogh’s drawings from its own collection which was influenced by Japanese art, The Countryside seen from Montmajour (July 1888). Van Gogh wrote of this drawing: “It does NOT look Japanese, and it’s actually the most Japanese thing that I’ve done.” 

As the British Museum curator Alfred Haft explains, the drawing pulls the viewer through a “range of viewpoints”, suggesting that “European perspective is not the only way to endow a landscape picture with a sense of sweeping depth”.

Van Gogh was among many avant-garde artists to be inspired by Hiroshige in the late-19th century. Others included James Whistler, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Henri Rivière, Théo van Rysselberghe and Arthur Dow. Claude Monet owned no fewer than 48 Hiroshige prints, including Sudden Shower over Ohashi and Atake.

Gauguin’s early masterpiece Vision of the Sermon (1888) was probably influenced by the cropped tree in The Plum Garden at Kameido. He may well have seen Van Gogh’s copy of the Hiroshige—and the Dutchman’s painting in homage.