East Meets West

Lyrical landscapes and colorful characters populate the woodblock prints of Utagawa Hiroshige, they brim with natural beauty and in a new exhibition, East Meets West: Hiroshige at The Phillips Collection , a world now past is revealed in his famous print series, The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, which is a 19th-century travelogue of stops along an ancient highway known as the Tokaido Road. During a journey through the mountains and along the sea, Hiroshige captured the essential rhythm of life with dramatic landscapes, humorous vignettes, and a vivid portrayal of the shifting seasons.

Curator Susan Behrends Frank has cleverly matched Hiroshige's images with 41 European and American pictures, illustrating the major influence that he had on western art and a number of prominent western artists. CNN explore this relationship, in an article, July 6, 2005 in their travel section.