Utagawa Hiroshige II

Who They Were

Utagawa Hiroshige II (二代目 歌川広重, うたがわ ひろしげ にだいめ, Utagawa Hiroshige nidaime) was a Japanese painter and designer of ukiyo-e (浮世絵, うきよえ, "pictures of the floating world") — the woodblock prints and paintings that dominated popular visual culture in Edo-period Japan. He lived from 1826 to 21 October 1869, dying at forty-three. He worked in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, and signed his prints with a name that had belonged to someone else first.

That borrowed name is the central fact of his career. Hiroshige II was the pupil and adopted heir of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), the most famous landscape print designer in Japanese history. When the elder Hiroshige died in 1858, his student inherited both the name and the workshop, and married his master's daughter. For seven years he produced prints under one of the most recognisable signatures in Japanese art.

Life and Career

He was born in 1826, in the ninth year of the Bunsei era (文政, ぶんせい) — a period that fell within the Edo period (1603–1868), the long stretch of Tokugawa shogunate rule that ended the year before his death. His birth name is not recorded in the standard reference material; he enters the historical record as a student in the Utagawa workshop, the largest and most commercially successful print-designing school in Edo.

The Utagawa school operated like a guild. Pupils trained under a master, produced designs that the workshop published, and in many cases eventually received a portion of the master's name as their own. The elder Hiroshige, born Andō Tokutarō, had himself been a pupil of Utagawa Toyohiro before taking the name Hiroshige. Passing a name down was normal practice; passing down the entire name, as happened in 1858, marked a designated successor.

On his master's death in 1858, the younger artist became Hiroshige II. He married Hiroshige's daughter, which reinforced his claim to the lineage, and continued the workshop's output of landscape and figure prints. His style was close enough to his master's that later scholars have repeatedly confused the two, attributing the pupil's work to the teacher or the reverse.

In 1865 everything changed. He dissolved his marriage and left Edo for Yokohama, the treaty port that had opened to foreign trade in 1859 and was rapidly becoming a distinct, internationally connected city. With the move he abandoned the Hiroshige name and began signing his work Kisai Risshō (喜斎立祥, きさい りっしょう; also read Ryūshō). The name Hiroshige passed instead to a fellow pupil, Shigenobu, who became Hiroshige III.

He died on 21 October 1869, four years after the move and one year into the Meiji era, which began in 1868 and ended the Edo period for good.

Why They Matter

Hiroshige II matters for three reasons, none of them simply artistic.

First, he is a case study in how Japanese art names worked. In Edo print culture, a name was an asset owned by a workshop and transferred by inheritance, adoption, or marriage. Understanding that system is necessary for reading any ukiyo-e signature correctly — and Hiroshige II is one of the clearest examples, because the transfer is documented and the successor is known.

Second, his work is a bridge between the Edo period and the Meiji era. He trained in the Tokugawa capital, inherited a Tokugawa-era brand, and then relocated to Yokohama, the city that most embodied Japan's forced opening to the West. His career spans the exact seam between two eras.

Third, the confusion between his work and his master's is itself historically significant. It shows how thoroughly the workshop system produced a house style — and it means that any study of late Hiroshige prints has to reckon with attribution problems that Hiroshige II created.

The Name in Japanese

The full professional name is 二代目 歌川広重.

Kana reading: うたがわ ひろしげ にだいめ

Romaji: Utagawa Hiroshige nidaime — conventionally written in English as "Utagawa Hiroshige II".

The name is read right to left in the traditional manner for names of this type: the lineage marker comes first in the written form, then the family name, then the given name. Breaking it down:

二 (に, ni) — "two". The first character of the lineage marker.

代 (だい, dai) — "generation", "era", "substitute". Together with 二 it forms 二代 (にだい, nidai), "second generation".

目 (め, me) — "eye", but here a counting suffix meaning "the -th", as in "the second". The three characters together, 二代目 (にだいめ, nidaime), mean "the second holder of the name" — the standard Japanese way of numbering a successor, used for actors, artisans, and artists alike. It is the exact equivalent of the Roman numeral "II" in English.

歌 (うた, uta) — "song", "poem". First character of the family name.

川 (がわ, gawa) — "river". Note the pronunciation shift: the character is read kawa in isolation but gawa when it follows another element, a common voicing change in Japanese compounds. Together, 歌川 (うたがわ, Utagawa) is the name of the school and lineage.

広 (ひろ, hiro) — "wide", "broad". First character of the given name.

重 (しげ, shige) — "heavy", "layered", "abundant". Together, 広重 (ひろしげ, Hiroshige) is the given name.

The logic of the whole is therefore: the second Utagawa Hiroshige. The family name 歌川 identifies the school; the given name 広重 identifies which name within that school; the prefix 二代目 states that this is the second person to hold it. When he renounced the name in 1865, he was renouncing all three parts at once.

Legacy

Hiroshige II's legacy is inseparable from the name he held for seven years. He kept the Utagawa workshop running after the death of the artist who made it famous, produced prints in a style close enough to fool later scholars, and then handed the name on to a third holder when he left Edo for Yokohama in 1865.

His own late work, signed Kisai Risshō, belongs to a different phase — the Yokohama years, when the old Edo print market was collapsing and the Meiji era was beginning. He died in 1869, before that new era had produced much of anything. What survives is a body of work that must be read alongside his master's, and a name that explains, better than any textbook, how Japanese artistic lineages were built and passed on.