This woodblock print inspired another famous artist to grab a brush and copy it directly, stroke for stroke, in oil paint.
What you're looking at
Utagawa Hiroshige made Plum Garden at Kameido in 1857, part of his series of prints depicting famous places around Edo, the city now known as Tokyo. A gnarled, blossoming plum tree cuts boldly across the foreground, its branches nearly filling the frame, while a garden full of other plum trees and visitors sits in flat planes of color behind it.
The print that Van Gogh painted himself
In Paris in 1887, Vincent van Gogh painted his own oil copy of this exact design, a work now titled Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige) and held today by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh was one of many European artists caught up in a wave of enthusiasm for Japanese prints in the late 1800s, and this composition, with its bold, cropped foreground tree set against flat background color, showed him and other Impressionists a genuinely different way of building a picture.
That kind of dramatic, close-up framing, with an object cutting straight across the canvas, was unusual in Western painting at the time. Hiroshige's print helped open the door to it.
One detail to look for
Look at how the branches of the plum tree cross directly over the garden view behind them, flattening the sense of depth on purpose. It's this exact device that Van Gogh borrowed when he made his own painted copy of the scene.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original sheet, 36 x 24.4 cm. Shop the canvas print.