The city we now call Tokyo was known until 1868 as Edo, the name given to the period of 250 years when Japan was virtually closed to the world – a period of unbroken peace, during which the Japanese developed a sophisticated and diverse culture unlike any other on earth. The life of the artist HIROSHIGE spans the last years of the Edo period, and his work provides one of the most engaging records of the life of the city – a treasury of several thousand images filled with animation and gentle humor, in which he explores the life and landscape of Japan and its wonderfully diverse people. Working almost exclusively in the medium of the woodblock print, usually associated with ‘ukiyo', the Floating World of fashion and entertainment, Hiroshige greatly extended the range of subject matter and the expressive power of the medium to portray every aspect of life in Edo-period Japan, from the beauty and drama of its mountains and forests to the variety and vigor of its bustling cities, set against the back ground of philosophy, history, and myth, of seasonal celebrations and personal pleasures. In HIROSHIGE IN TOKYO, Julian Bicknell explores this great artist's life and work against the rich background of Edo culture. He examines the technical and artistic foundations of woodblock printing and Hiroshige's unique contribution to the tradition of ‘ukiyo-e'. He provides detailed commentaries on the many masterpieces from Hiroshige's most important series of prints – ‘Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido and ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo' – identifying the locations and the symbolic significance of the imagery as Hiroshige's audience would have understood them in terms of myth, history, poetry, and the interlacing of memory and experience that creates the ‘genius loci' – the spirit of place