Ukiyo-e

A print was a collaboration organised by a publisher (hanmoto), who commissioned the design, financed production and sold the result. The artist (eshi) drew the design in ink on thin paper. A carver (horishi) pasted it face down on a block of cherry wood and cut away everything but the lines, destroying the drawing in the process. Further blocks were cut for each colour. The printer (surishi) then inked the blocks with water-based pigments and rubbed sheets of damp washi paper on them with a baren pad, using registration marks (kentō) to align the colours.

Print runs could reach thousands of impressions, and popular designs were reissued with changes. Government censorship regulated subject matter and required approval seals on prints.

Ukiyo-e followed the tastes of its buyers. Actor prints and pictures of beautiful women dominated the eighteenth century; landscapes became a major genre only in the 1830s, when travel boomed.

Many hundreds of artists designed ukiyo-e, often trained in schools such as the Torii, Katsukawa and Utagawa, whose members took the school name. A handful of masters defined the art.

After Japan opened to the West in the 1850s, prints reached Europe in large numbers. Artists such as Monet, Degas, Whistler and Van Gogh collected them; Van Gogh painted copies of Hiroshige prints, and the flat colour, bold cropping and everyday subjects of ukiyo-e fed into Impressionism, Art Nouveau and poster design. This enthusiasm for Japanese art became known as Japonisme.

In Japan, ukiyo-e declined with the arrival of photography and modern printing in the Meiji era. In the twentieth century the shin-hanga ('new prints') movement, led by the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō with artists such as Kawase Hasui, revived the collaborative system for landscapes and portraits, while the sōsaku-hanga ('creative prints') movement had artists carve and print their own designs. Ukiyo-e is often seen as an ancestor of manga.

Prints are fragile and light-sensitive, so museums rotate their displays, typically every month or so. Collections are held by the Tokyo National Museum and many specialist museums.