Big Fireworks at Ryo_goku 1847 - 1852

Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Big Fireworks at Ryogoku” is a woodblock print, made in Japan in the late Edo period. This wasn’t just a matter of carving a design into a block and printing it once. Each color required a separate block, meticulously carved, and then carefully aligned to layer the image. Notice the flat expanses of color, the strong outlines, and the way depth is suggested through overlapping forms, as this print captures a lively summer evening scene with fireworks over the Ryogoku Bridge. The figures are reduced to silhouettes, suggesting a populace fully absorbed in leisure. Woodblock printing was a highly developed form of craft, a collaborative process involving the artist, block carver, printer, and publisher. These artisans played a crucial role in shaping Japanese visual culture. It's easy to think of prints as multiples, endlessly reproducible, but each impression required considerable labor and expertise. By appreciating the work involved, we can see how Hiroshige's seemingly simple image belongs to a broader history of creative practices.