Hiroshige III

Who They Were

Utagawa Hiroshige III (三代目 歌川広重, Sandaime Utagawa Hiroshige) was a Japanese painter and ukiyo-e artist who lived from 1842 until March 28, 1894. Ukiyo-e (浮世絵, ukiyo-e) means "pictures of the floating world" — woodblock prints and paintings of city life, landscapes, actors and famous places that flourished in Japan from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Hiroshige III was a student of the first Utagawa Hiroshige, one of the most celebrated print designers in Japanese history, and he spent his career working in his master's style.

He was born Gotō Torakichi (後藤寅吉) and was also known as Andō Tokubei (安藤徳兵). His birth fell in Tenpō 天保 (year 12 of the era), the nengo — 年号, nengō, era name — that ran from 1830 to 1844. He is counted as the third artist to carry the name Hiroshige, a name that functioned less as a personal signature than as a professional title passed down within a workshop.

Life and Career

Hiroshige III trained under the original Utagawa Hiroshige, the print designer whose landscape series made him famous in the 1830s and 1840s. At the outset of his career he was given the artistic name Shigemasa. This was a common arrangement in Edo-period Japan: a pupil received a name from his teacher, and that name signalled his place within the school.

The line of succession to the Hiroshige name was tangled. When the first Hiroshige died, a fellow pupil took the name Hiroshige II. In 1867, Hiroshige II divorced the master's daughter Otatsu, and Gotō Torakichi married her. He then initially took on the name Hiroshige II as well, before settling into the name Hiroshige III by 1869. The marriage, in other words, was the mechanism by which the workshop name changed hands — the name travelled with the daughter of the founding master.

Hiroshige III worked in the same artistic style as his master. He produced prints in the established ukiyo-e idiom, the mode of picture-making that the first Hiroshige had perfected. He did not, however, achieve anywhere near the same level of success. His career unfolded during the last years of the Edo period (1603–1868) and continued into the decades that followed, a period when Japan's print industry was being reshaped by new technologies and new tastes.

Why They Matter

Hiroshige III matters chiefly as a case study in how artistic names worked in Japan. The name "Hiroshige" was not fixed to a single person; it was a transferable professional identity, and the story of how it moved from the first Hiroshige to Hiroshige II to Hiroshige III — through apprenticeship, marriage and divorce — shows how tightly art, family and workshop economics were bound together.

He also represents the long tail of ukiyo-e. The first Hiroshige is a canonical figure; Hiroshige III is one of the many capable artists who kept the style alive without reaching the same heights. Studying him gives a more accurate picture of what a working print designer's career actually looked like in the nineteenth century, as opposed to the handful of names that dominate histories of the medium.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is written 三代目 歌川広重. It is read in kana as さんだいめ うたがわ ひろしげ, and romanised as Sandaime Utagawa Hiroshige.

Breaking it down:

• 三 — read here as san, meaning "three".
• 代 — read here as dai, meaning "generation" or "era".
• 目 — read here as me, a counter suffix meaning "the -th", so that 三代目 (sandaime) means "the third generation" or "the third holder of the name".
• 歌 — read here as uta, meaning "song" or "poem".
• 川 — read here as gawa, meaning "river". Together, 歌川 (Utagawa) is the name of the school or workshop to which the artist belonged.
• 広 — read here as hiro, meaning "wide" or "broad".
• 重 — read here as shige, meaning "heavy", "layered" or "abundant". Together, 広重 (Hiroshige) is the artistic name itself.

So the full name means, roughly, "Hiroshige of the Utagawa school, the third of that name". The prefix 三代目 is the crucial part: it tells a reader that this is not the original Hiroshige but the third artist to inherit the title. Japanese naming conventions of this kind — where a celebrated name is passed down and numbered — are still found today in kabuki, rakugo and other traditional arts.

Legacy

Hiroshige III died on March 28, 1894. He left behind a body of work in the ukiyo-e tradition, produced under a name that had already been made famous by two predecessors. His place in the record is bound up with that name: he is remembered as the third Hiroshige, the artist who carried the title into the final years of the nineteenth century.

For students of Japanese, his name is a compact lesson in how the language handles succession and inheritance. The counter 代 (dai) for generations, the numbering suffix 目 (me), and the workshop name 歌川 (Utagawa) all appear in the names of countless artists, actors and craftsmen. Reading 三代目 歌川広重 correctly means recognising three separate systems at work in a single name: a generation count, a school affiliation, and an inherited artistic title.