Travel scenes and landscapes.
Woodblock prints in the ukiyo e style.
Our japanese woodblock print collections contain over 25 000 prints and related paintings drawings and books covering a wide range of common ukiyo e themes including beauties and actors landscapes heroic and folk tales and erotica.
It features the great masters of the genre such as suzuki harunobu 1725 70 utagawa hiroshige 1797 1858 katsushika hokusai 1760 1849 and utagawa kunisada 1786 1864.
Ukiyo e is a style of painting and woodblock printing created in japan from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
Aimed at the prosperous merchant class in the urbanizing edo period 1603 1868 its subjects included female beauties.
Suzuki horunobu revolutionized ukiyo e when in 1765 he invented the process to make nishiki e or brocade prints that made possible a full employment of color.
Ukiyo e is a genre of woodblock prints and paintings which flourished in japanese art from the late 17th to late 19th century.
Celebrated for their one of a kind process and distinctive aesthetic woodblock prints have become a widely recognized and iconic form of japanese art.
Ukiyo e prints were like today s posters or magazines and demand was widespread.
Along with paintings prints produced from the 17th century through the 19th century captured the spirit of ukiyo e a genre that presented pictures of the floating world to the public.
The process involved making a series of woodblocks all bearing the same image and then a single color being applied to each block so that the color on the final print was the result of layers of pigment.
The word ukiyo was originally a buddhist term which described the sadness and transience of human life it meant the floating world.
Kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers.
Woodblock prints of the edo period most frequently depicted the seductive courtesans and exciting kabuki actors jp2822 of the urban pleasure districts.