Plum Estate, Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki)

Catalog note / 解説

The Plum Garden at Kameido is perhaps one of the best-known Hiroshige prints outside Japan because Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) copied it as an oil painting in 1877. By copying Japanese prints, he learned how to use colors differently for their decorative rather than descriptive potential, so that the sky, for example, could be painted a vivid red without appearing unnatural. Van Gogh also adopted from Japanese prints the expressive power of large areas of a single color, brushed in relatively flat strokes. The Academy owns three different impressions of this print, of which this is the earliest. All three prints demonstrate Hiroshige's unique composition: objects in front are exaggerated i…