What Is Ukiyo-e? Japanese Woodblock Prints from Hokusai to Hiroshige

Ukiyo-e means pictures of the floating world and refers to the Japanese woodblock prints and paintings made during the Edo period (1603–1868). They showed the pleasure life of the city: actors, courtesans, festivals and, later, landscapes. The best-known Japanese woodblock prints, Hokusai's The Great Wave and Hiroshige's views of Edo, are ukiyo-e. The pictures were printed in large editions from a separate woodblock for each colour.

Facts

The floating world

The word ukiyo had long had a Buddhist ring: the transient earthly life, a world of sorrow. In the 17th century it acquired a new meaning in the growing city of Edo. Samurai, merchants and craftsmen lived there, and they sought pleasure in the theatre, in teahouses and in the licensed pleasure quarters. The floating world became a term for this life in the moment, the enjoyment of what will soon be gone.

Ukiyo-e were the pictures of that world. During the Edo period Japan was largely closed to the outside world, and the country enjoyed a long period of peace. The cities grew, and an affluent urban public wanted pictures of its idols and its pleasures, much as people today collect posters and postcards. The prints were cheap, roughly the price of a meal, and were sold in large numbers.

How a woodblock print was made

A ukiyo-e print was a team effort. The publisher commissioned and sold the picture. The artist drew the design in ink on thin paper. A carver pasted the drawing onto a block of cherry wood and cut away the lines, destroying the original drawing in the process. Then a block was cut for each colour, with small notches in the corners that made the paper land in exactly the same place at every impression.

The printer brushed water-based colour onto the blocks and rubbed the paper against them with a flat disc, not in a press. He could therefore vary the colour, for example letting the sky grow darker towards the top. From about 1830 the imported pigment Prussian blue was used, which gave the deep blues of Hokusai's and Hiroshige's landscapes. The explanatory illustration further down shows the woodblock print in cross-section; also read the guide to printmaking techniques.

Actors and beauties

The early prints were black and white or hand-coloured. Around 1765 Suzuki Harunobu began making prints in full colour, known as brocade pictures, using many colour blocks. His young women are slender, almost weightless and seen in poetic everyday scenes.

The actors of the kabuki theatre were the stars of the age, and pictures of them in famous roles were sold as portraits of idols. The pictures of beauties, bijin-ga, showed courtesans and women from city life. In the 1790s Kitagawa Utamaro made close-ups of women's faces, often just head and shoulders against a mica-glittering background, which were new in their intimacy. The authorities viewed the pleasure life with suspicion and several times introduced rules on what could be printed.

The landscapes: Hokusai and Hiroshige

In the 1830s landscape became a main subject in its own right. Katsushika Hokusai was already over seventy when, around 1831, he published the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, in which an enormous wave with claw-like crests of foam rises over three boats, and Fuji appears small in the trough between the waves. Hokusai was also a tireless draughtsman and published sketchbooks with thousands of motifs, the Hokusai Manga.

Utagawa Hiroshige was younger and more lyrical. His series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō of 1833–1834 depicts the journey along the highway between Edo and Kyoto, in rain, snow, fog and evening light. In the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, from his last years, is Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge of 1857, in which the rain falls in thin, slanting lines over people hurrying across a bridge. Hiroshige often uses tall formats, bold crops and a foreground that cuts into the picture.

Warriors, cats and the end

Utagawa Kuniyoshi was known for dramatic pictures of warriors from legends and novels, with giant skeletons and sea monsters, and for humorous pictures of cats. He shows how broad ukiyo-e was: from poetry to the pace of a comic book.

After 1868, when Japan was opened up and modernised during the Meiji period, photography and new printing techniques took over. In the 20th century the woodblock print lived on in new movements. But as early as the 1860s the prints had reached Europe in large numbers, where they acquired an unexpected importance for art; read the guide to Japonisme.

Seeing ukiyo-e

A ukiyo-e print exists in many copies, and the best of them are in museums around the world. The Great Wave and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge are, for example, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Early impressions have sharper lines and more nuanced colours than later ones, and the paper is sensitive to light, so the prints are often displayed only for short periods.

Look for the black outlines, the flat fields of colour without shadows, the high horizon and the bold crops. Look, too, for the publisher's and artist's seals and signatures in the margin. The history of Japanese art, from Jōmon to the present, can be found in the app's Japanese trails, and the architecture section has a guide to Japanese architecture.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What does ukiyo-e mean?