Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e, pictures of the floating world, is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Its artists made woodblock prints and paintings of beautiful women, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, scenes from history and folk tales, travel views and landscapes, flora and fauna, and erotica.
Definition
The floating world was the pleasure quarter of the Edo-period city, the theatres, teahouses and courtesans' houses where townspeople spent the money a growing economy gave them. Ukiyo-e is the art made for and about that world, and for the merchants who lived in it. Its most familiar form is the colour woodblock print, made in numbers and popular with the chonin, the townspeople, who had become wealthy enough to decorate their homes with prints and paintings.
A print was the work of a team. The artist designed it; the carver cut the woodblocks; the printer inked and pressed the blocks onto handmade paper; and the publisher financed, promoted and distributed the work. Artists rarely carved their own blocks. Because printing was done by hand, printers could achieve effects that machines could not, such as a gradation of colour on the block.
Origin
In 1603 the city of Edo, today's Tokyo, became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate, and it grew to over a million people by the nineteenth century. The earliest ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s, with Hishikawa Moronobu's paintings and black-and-white prints of beautiful women. In the 1760s the success of Suzuki Harunobu's brocade prints made full-colour printing standard, with ten or more blocks used for each sheet.
Specialists prize the late eighteenth-century portraits of beauties and actors by masters such as Torii Kiyonaga, Utamaro and Sharaku. In the nineteenth century came Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa and Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. After those two masters died, and with the modernisation that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, production went into steep decline. From the 1870s Japonisme carried the prints into the work of Degas, Manet and Monet, and in the twentieth century the shin-hanga movement revived traditional printmaking.
Key facts
| Meaning | Pictures of the floating world |
|---|---|
| Period | From the 1670s to the late nineteenth century |
| Full colour | Standard from the 1760s, after Harunobu |
| Makers | Artist, carver, printer and publisher |
| Subjects | Beauties, actors, wrestlers, history, landscapes, nature, erotica |
| Revival | Shin-hanga, twentieth century |
How to identify it
- Paper and printing. In our handling, a hand-printed sheet shows the grain of the woodblock and slight embossing where the paper was pressed; a photographic reproduction is flat.
- Seals and signatures. In our reading, the artist's signature, the publisher's mark and any other seals are read together; they help frame a date range.
- Edition. Popular designs were printed many times, and later impressions lose sharpness and change colour. Our page on ukiyo-e originals and reproductions explains the difference.
- Trimming and fading. Margins are often cut and colours faded by light; describe both.
Where it appears in the collection
Ukiyo-e reaches the collection in two ways. Edo-period books such as an Edo-style woodblock book of fifteen scenes sit with the shunga shelf, and its designs live on in clothing such as the Tedman ukiyo-e sukajan of Raijin and an oiran. For the history and the terms, see our history of ukiyo-e and its masters and our glossary of print terms.
Related entries
- Shunga: the erotic branch of the same prints.
- Wagara: the Japanese patterns that carry ukiyo-e subjects onto cloth.
- Sukajan: the jacket that put ukiyo-e motifs into embroidery.
Sources
- Ukiyo-e, encyclopaedia entry, sections on history, production and the Meiji decline. wikipedia.org
Last reviewed 15 November 2026. The Japonista Curation and Concierge Team, Tokyo, Japan.