Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e, translated as “pictures of the floating world,” is a genre of Japanese art comprising paintings and woodblock prints that became popular from the 17th through the 19th centuries.⁵ It depicted scenes from history and folktales, sumo wrestlers, landscapes of flora and fauna, kabuki actors, courtesans, and erotica.⁵ The word originally reflected the Buddhist idea of the transitory, sorrowful nature of life, combining uki for sadness and yo for life; during the early Edo period a homophone meaning “to float” was substituted, and the term came to express an attitude of joie de vivre toward worldly pleasures.³⁴

The art developed in the city of Edo — now Tokyo — during the Tokugawa or Edo period, a relatively peaceful span of roughly 250 years, dated 1603–1868 or 1615–1868, during which the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan.⁸⁴¹³ The regime segregated society into four classes — warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants — placing merchants at the bottom despite their growing wealth.⁴ These newly rich townspeople, known as chōnin, found themselves economically powerful but socially confined, and turned their assets toward conspicuous consumption and the pleasures of the entertainment districts.⁴ The Tokugawa shogunate set aside walled areas in major cities for brothels, teahouses, and theaters, and in these districts all classes comingled.⁴ Though initially considered “low” art, ukiyo-e frequently referred to classical, literary, and historical themes, demanding a high level of visual and cultural literacy.⁸

Subjects and subgenres

The “floating world” referred to the licensed brothel and theater districts of Japan’s major cities, inhabited by prostitutes and kabuki actors.⁷ Actors and courtesans became the style icons of their day, and their fashions spread to the general population through inexpensive prints.⁷ Several subgenres blossomed under the ukiyo-e umbrella: images of beautiful women (bijin-ga), erotica (shunga), portraits of subjects with large heads, bird-and-flower pictures, and landscapes such as views of Mount Fuji.³ Kabuki — a fusion of dance and drama derived from the ancient Nō theater and introduced in Kyoto at the beginning of the seventeenth century by a female performer named Okuni — provided the actor portraits (yakusha-e) that were among the most sought-after prints.⁴⁹

The earliest most-favored subjects were scenes of merry-making at houses of pleasure, especially in the Yoshiwara quarter of Edo, and around the Kanbun era (1661–72) individual courtesans and actresses were singled out for portrayal.⁴ In the early nineteenth century, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) brought the art back to landscape views, often with a seasonal theme.⁴ Centuries of peace and a developed road system had fostered leisure travel, creating a demand for prints of famous landscapes bought as cheap souvenirs.⁷ Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa, part of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (about 1831), is perhaps the most iconic of all ukiyo-e prints.⁷⁹ Folklore also provided dramatic subjects, as in Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre of about 1844.⁷

Production process

Ukiyo-e prints were rarely carved by the artist who designed them; production was divided among a collaborative team known as the “ukiyo-e quartet”.⁵⁷ It comprised the publisher, who financed, coordinated, and marketed the work and often chose the theme; the designer or artist, who drew the design in ink on paper; the block cutter, who carved the design into cherry wood; and the printer, who inked the blocks and pressed them onto handmade paper.⁷⁸¹¹ Cherry wood was favored for its fine, even grain, and paper made from the inner bark of mulberry was preferred for its strength and absorbency.⁷¹¹ During the Edo period the number of blocks averaged ten to sixteen, and could number up to twenty for a full-color print.⁸¹¹

Woodblock printing had been known in Japan as early as the eighth century, primarily for reproducing Buddhist texts, and what ukiyo-e printmakers achieved was the innovative use of a centuries-old technique.⁴¹¹ The earliest prints were monochrome, printed in black ink and sometimes colored by hand.⁷⁸ In the 1740s additional blocks introduced pink and green, but only in 1765 was the technique of multiple color blocks perfected, producing the glorious full-color prints known as nishiki-e, or “brocade pictures”.⁷ These first polychrome prints were calendars commissioned by a group of wealthy patrons in Edo.¹¹ Registration marks — small cuts on the edge of each block — allowed the printer to align the separate colors precisely, and hand printing permitted effects such as blending and gradation unachievable by machine.⁷⁵ Ukiyo-e was also richly represented in woodblock-printed picture books called ehon.⁸ The last quarter of the eighteenth century is regarded as the golden age of printmaking.⁴

Lineage and legacy

Ukiyo-e represents the final phase in the long evolution of Japanese genre painting, drawing on earlier developments focused on human figures, and it furthered the earlier yamato-e tradition of Japanese art, with its aerial perspectives, precise details, clear outlines, and flat color.⁴³ The Art Story dates the movement from 1672 to the 1880s, while other institutions locate its stylistic maturity in 1765 with the advent of full-color printing.³⁷

The genre produced a succession of recognized masters. Hishikawa Moronobu was among the earliest.³¹⁰ Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770) worked at the birth of full-color printing.⁷¹¹ Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) was known for his bijin ōkubi-e, large-headed pictures of beautiful women.⁵ Tōshūsai Sharaku, active only in 1794–1795 and of unknown identity, produced striking actor portraits.⁵ Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) was the most prolific and commercially successful designer, with an output estimated at more than 20,000 designs.⁵ Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) carried the tradition into the Meiji period, with Kiyochika employing Western-inspired light-and-shade effects called kōsen-ga.⁵

In the decade following Hiroshige’s death in 1858, the major printmakers disappeared amid the upheavals that brought down the Tokugawa shogunate in 1867, and ukiyo-e was largely swept away as Japan modernized along Western lines.⁴ The genre later informed twentieth-century movements including shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga.¹⁰

Ukiyo-e was one of the first forms of Japanese art to reach Europe and America with the opening of trade, and its influence there became known as Japonism.³ Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, and Kitagawa Utamaro were among the master artists whose colorful prints and books provided inspiration to Impressionist painters.¹ James McNeil Whistler’s etching “Old Battersea Bridge” showed a thematic and stylistic debt to Hiroshige’s “Nihon Bridge in Snow”.¹ Vincent Van Gogh collected and admired Japanese prints, whose color schemes, linework, and unusual viewpoints surfaced in his paintings, and he copied Hiroshige’s plum-garden design in 1887.¹⁹ Mary Cassatt’s “Woman Bathing” was inspired by the intimate bathing scenes common in ukiyo-e prints.¹ Utamaro’s work, particularly popular in France, influenced the Impressionists through its partial views and emphasis on light and shade.⁵ The style went on to shape Western movements including Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and Modernism.³