British Museum’s exhibition on the Japanese master printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) will include Van Gogh’s own copy of a print which he used in a painting in homage.
Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road (1 May-7 September 2025) is to showcase the work of one of the 19th-century’s greatest Japanese artists, with over 100 prints (many from the American collector Alan Medaugh). Although Van Gogh plays a secondary role in the London exhibition, the British Museum has secured rare loans which emphasise how Japanese art inspired avant-garde European artists.
It was while Van Gogh was living in Paris in 1886-88 that he discovered Japanese art, buying over 600 prints from the dealer Siegfried Bing. Most of these survive at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and they include no fewer than 78 by Hiroshige.
Van Gogh’s tribute to Hiroshige is expressed most dramatically in two paintings that were based on the Japanese artist’s prints. The first was inspired by Hiroshige’s The Plum Garden at Kameido (1857), an early morning view of blossom in a district in Edo (now Tokyo).
Van Gogh’s copy of the print of The Plum Garden at Kameido will be on display in the British Museum exhibition, on loan from Amsterdam. The Dutch artist’s own copies of Japanese prints are only very occasionally lent by the Van Gogh Museum, for conservation reasons, and this particular one has been loaned only once, when it went to Hamburg in 2002.
Van Gogh’s copy of Hiroshige’s print has long ago faded, but this reflects the fact that during the Dutchman’s time in Paris Japanese prints were inexpensive and treated casually. Van Gogh paid an average of 15 centimes—the French currency of the time—per print, not much more than the price of a coffee. Copies of The Plum Garden at Kameido typically now sell for around £50,000.
Having acquired a copy of the print, Van Gogh made a tracing of the composition. He then squared it up, enlarging it slightly for his painting. This tracing is also coming to the British Museum.
In his painting, Van Gogh diverged from Hiroshige’s composition by adding two prominent vertical strips of Japanese characters on the sides. These are real Japanese words, but taken from other prints and are unrelated to the garden scene. Van Gogh presumably added them to emphasise that it was a Japanese-inspired work.
It should come as no surprise that Van Gogh chose to depict a blossom scene, since they are common in Japanese art and he himself loved flowering trees in spring. Soon after his move to Arles, in early 1888, he made more than a dozen paintings of fruit blossom.
