Ukiyo-e

About

The word ukiyo, “floating world”, echoes an older Buddhist term for the sorrowful, impermanent world. In 17th-century Edo, now Tokyo, it meant passing pleasures: kabuki theatre, the licensed Yoshiwara quarter, fashion and travel. Ukiyo-e, pictures of that world, were paintings and above all cheap woodblock prints made by a team: a publisher commissioned the design, a carver cut cherry-wood blocks and a printer inked each colour by hand.

Early prints were black ink, sometimes hand-coloured; full-colour printing arrived in 1765 with Suzuki Harunobu's delicate figures. Kitagawa Utamaro specialised in close-up portraits of women in the 1790s, and Tōshūsai Sharaku produced startling actor likenesses in under a year. Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831) and Utagawa Hiroshige's Tōkaidō road views made landscape a major subject, helped by imported Prussian blue. From the 1860s the prints fed Japonisme in Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.