Art review Master who taught the impressionists how to capture pleasure

The only thing wrong with the British Museum's rapturous trip through the Technicolor world of Utagawa Hiroshige's prints is its final section, which explores this early 19th-century Japanese artist's continuing global influence.

- Jonathan Jones

The only thing wrong with the British Museum's rapturous trip through the Technicolor world of Utagawa Hiroshige's prints is its final section, which explores this early 19th-century Japanese artist's continuing global influence. A patchy sampling of his imitators is all a bit rushed. But then, to do justice to his after-echoes would take a blockbuster in itself, not an epilogue.

Everywhere I looked up to this point, it was evident how precisely French impressionism followed his cues. Take rain. It becomes a pleasurable event in Renoir's The Umbrellas, but it was Hiroshige who first saw rain as a lighthearted excuse to put up umbrellas in works such as his 1830s print Tarui.

The impressionist theme of snow, enjoyed by Monet, is also delightfully anticipated by Hiroshige's 1832-34 work Snow-viewing by the Sumida River. This triptych shows the French avant-garde took much more than imagery from him. Artists and writers in late 19th-century Paris adopted his whole philosophy. For Snow-viewing encapsulates the way Hiroshige looks at the world, with a hedonism he shares with those he depicts. In this print, a well-dressed family hunch up on a cold day in Edo (now Tokyo).