Japanese artist Hiroshige and fireworks in art

The great Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) is currently featured in an exhibition at the British Museum entitled 'Artist of the Open Road', which includes one of the pictures I used in my book A History of Fireworks from their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion Books) in the chapter on fireworks in the arts.

Entitled Fireworks over Ryogoku Bridge (1858), it is a woodblock print showing a display at the famous bridge built in the seventeenth century over the Sumida River in Tokyo. The area remains a popular venue for pyrotechnics to this day, and there is also a fireworks museum. 

Not featured in the exhibition, but included in my book is another of Hiroshige's prints Enjoying the Fireworks and the Cool of the Evening at Ryogoku Bridge (c. 1847). This work concentrates on the audience rather than the fireworks.

Although there are many fine pictures of fireworks from famous painters such as Turner, Whistler and Joseph Wright, quite a few artists have found the audience as interesting as the spectacle. As early as 1579, Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla’s depiction of the celebrated Castel Sant’Angelo display in Rome shows a rather blasé crowd. Although they are so small in the frame to be almost a detail, on close examination they seem to be chatting among themselves rather than taking in the great events in the sky.

While in Fire-Works on the Night of the Fourth of July (1868) by the American artist Winslow Homer, the fireworks are incidental and our eye is drawn to the toff in the foreground, whose hat is being hit by a falling rocket

This is the link for the exhibition - https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hiroshige-artist-open-road?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22446594171&gbraid=0AAAAADPXika-SUY2YYg-fnS52S2BwTZU-&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIj92kspndjgMViplQBh187xnjEAAYASAAEgJp0vD_BwE