Ukiyo-e: An introduction.

Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from predominately the 17th century through to the end of the 19th century. Although ukiyo-e artists also produced paintings, their woodblock prints are more commonly associated. The rise and fall of ukiyo-e as an art form is closely linked to the Edo period (c. 1603 to 1868), a period of relative peace in Japan installed by a conservative military government. In 1603, the city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The chōnin class (primarily merchants and artisans), those positioned at the bottom of the government-regulated social order, benefited greatly from the city's consequent economic expansion. As a result, they began to indulge more in the city’s entertainment sector, particularly the kabuki theatres and licensed brothels. The term, ukiyo, meaning ‘floating world’, quickly developed to describe this new, emerging indulgent and hedonistic lifestyle and ukiyo-e eventually came to mean 'pictures of the floating world’.

The earliest known ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s, with Hishikawa Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints. Colour prints were introduced gradually, but at first only produced for special commissions. However, by the 1740s, artists were using multiple woodblocks to print areas of colour and by the 1760s, full-colour production was becoming standardised, with ten or more blocks used to create each print. Artists rarely carved their own woodblocks for printing and rather, production was divided between the artist, the woodcarver, the printer and the publisher.

Although the 18th century established the popularity for ukiyo-e, the 19th century saw some of the most famous masters of the tradition, including Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) who produced The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) with his Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji which included The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1830-32), one of the most well known works of Japanese art. Towards the end of the 19th century, following the deaths of these two masters and confronted with increasing technological as well as social modernisation, ukiyo-e production went into sharp decline.

This collection represents a fantatsic opportunity to place a piece of social and artistic Japanese history in your home with works by contemporaries of the world famous artists Hiroshige and Hokkusai.