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Human | Nature
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
150 Years of Japanese Landscape Prints
Selected from the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores Japan’s journey with and through nature during the 19th century and into the modern age through the lens of landscape prints, revealing the at-once reverential and playful spirit in which people held the trees, mountains, and rivers around them.
World-renowned print artists Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) mirrored and molded people’s relationship with nature, inviting them to roam remote mountain passes interspersed with vertiginous waterfalls or reflect on the lyrical beauty of legendary meisho (famous places). These artists show us how nature can awe and inspire, as in Hokusai’s magisterial tribute to Japan’s most revered peak, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Hiroshige’s snapshots of urban flora and fauna in the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo also capture how nature charms and surprises as it insinuates itself into city life.