Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e is an art movement of the 1700–1900 period. The gallery holds 1,142 works in this movement, including works by Genki, Katsushika Hokusai and Kawanabe Kyōsai 河鍋暁斎. Browse Ukiyo-e paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Ukiyo-e — "pictures of the floating world" — was a genre of woodblock prints and paintings that flourished in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868), reaching its height in the prosperous cities of Edo (modern Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto. Its rise was inseparable from social change: the Tokugawa shogunate's long peace fostered a wealthy, literate merchant class whose tastes the rigid feudal order did not officially recognize. Barred from samurai privilege, these townspeople poured their money into the pleasures of the moment — the kabuki theatre and the licensed pleasure quarters such as Edo's Yoshiwara. The Buddhist term ukiyo, once a lament for this "sorrowful world" of transience, was punningly reinvented to mean the "floating world" of fleeting urban delight, and ukiyo-e became its mirror.

The subjects followed that world directly: bijin-ga (portraits of beautiful women and courtesans), yakusha-e (kabuki actors), sumo wrestlers, episodes from history and legend, erotica (shunga), and, later, landscapes, travel views, birds, and flowers. Early prints were monochrome sumizuri-e, sometimes hand-coloured, but technique advanced rapidly. In 1765 Suzuki Harunobu pioneered the full-colour nishiki-e ("brocade pictures"), printed from five or more carefully registered blocks. Each print was a collaboration of four hands — the designing artist, the block carver, the printer, and the publisher who financed and marketed the result.

The canon runs from Hishikawa Moronobu, generally credited as the first ukiyo-e master, through Harunobu and the great bijin-ga artist Kitagawa Utamaro, to the enigmatic Tōshūsai Sharaku, whose intense actor portraits appeared in 1794–95. Katsukawa Shunshō reshaped actor prints and trained the young Hokusai; Isoda Koryūsai excelled in prints and bird-and-flower paintings. The genre culminated in two landscape masters: Katsushika Hokusai, whose Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (begun c. 1831) contains the world-famous Great Wave off Kanagawa, and Utagawa Hiroshige, whose Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833–34) defined the travel print.

When Japan reopened in the mid-19th century, ukiyo-e prints reached Europe and ignited Japonisme, profoundly shaping Manet, Degas, Monet, Whistler, and Van Gogh, who copied Hiroshige directly. Their flat colour, asymmetric composition, and bold cropping helped reorient Western painting toward modernism.