Hiroshige III Museum at the Second National Industrial Exhibition in Ueno, Tokyo

An original 1881 woodblock print – Hiroshige III, Museum at the Second National Industrial Exhibition in Ueno, Tokyo.

This striking triptych by Hiroshige III shows the newly built Museum at the Second National Industrial Exhibition in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

Hiroshige III produced several print series documenting the urban development of Tokyo and Japan during the early Meiji period. This triptych forms part of his Tokyo Meisho Zue (Famous Places in Tokyo) series, started in 1868.

Japan's Second National Industrial Exhibition took place in 1881. Hiroshige's colourful triptych shows attendees at the exhibition, gathered around the fountain in Uedo Park, against the backdrop of the new Imperial Museum. As such, the image embodies the modernising goal of the Meiji period, when Japan was newly opening to Western influences.

The isolationist policy instituted by the Tokugawa Shogunate had recently come to an end, and Emperor Meiji, aware of his country’s archaic state compared to the major Western powers, would conduct an intense policy of modernisation throughout his reign. The Industrial Exhibition itself, first held in 1877, was set up to encourage the development of national industries. Held in the new Ueno Park, Japan's first public park, the 1881 exhibition attracted 820,000 visitors over 122 days. The gas street lamps introduced at the exhibition were said to have been very popular.

Central to the exhibition was the just-completed Museum's main building. Significantly, this was designed by the British architect Josiah Conder, who was hired by the Meiji government as a professor of architecture for the Imperial College of Engineering and became architect of Japan's Public Works. Conder's work represents the introduction of Western architecture to Japan. In his design for the Museum he conflated modern Western materials, such as red brick and stone facing, with a Pseudo-Saracenic style featuring Mughal elements that drew heavily on British colonial architecture in India. Although Conder had a deep knowledge of Japanese timber-frame architecture, this was not evident in his Orientalist design. The Museum building was subsequently severely damaged in the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923; the exhibits were moved and its collapse led to disillusionment with the architecture and style it represented. Conder's other work included the Rokumeikan, which became a controversial symbol of Westernisation in the Meiji period.

Utagawa Hiroshige III (1842/1843–1894) was born Gotō Torakichi, the son of a shipbuilder in the Fukugawa district of Edo. He first studied as a teenager with Utagawa Hiroshige I (1797–1858) until the master's death. He was given the artistic name Shigemasa. In 1867, after Hiroshige II, a fellow pupil of the original Hiroshige, divorced the master's daughter Otatsu, Gotō married her and initially took on the name Hiroshige II, but by 1869 he decided to call himself Hiroshige III.

Japanese woodblock print on three separate sheets. The sheets are separate and unmounted.