First Tuesday Lecture Series – Hiroshige’s Tokaido: The Ordinary and the Extraordinary on the Road in Early Nineteenth-Century Japan

Taking advantage of the Muscarelle Museum of Art’s exhibition of five different versions of Ando Hiroshige’s renowned print series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido,” this talk will focus on the artist’s representation of everyday life in the extraordinarily vibrant space that was the Tokaido in the early nineteenth century. The talk will discuss individual prints depicting stops on the famous highway, with particular attention to visual culture, the changing practice of travel, and concepts of space and place in early nineteenth-century Japan.