What is ukiyo-e art?
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica.
What is the ukiyo-e print market like?
The ukiyo-e print market was highly diversified as it sold to a heterogeneous public, from dayworkers to wealthy merchants. Little concrete information is known about production and consumption habits.
What do we know about Ukiyo-e consumption in Edo Japan?
Detailed records in Edo were kept of a wide variety of courtesans, actors, and sumo wrestlers, but no such records pertaining to ukiyo-e remain—or perhaps ever existed. Determining what is understood about the demographics of ukiyo-e consumption has required indirect means.
What is ukiyo-e woodblock printing?
Ukiyo-e is a famous Japanese woodblock print style that emerged in the 17th century. Throughout its evolution, it gave rise to some of the most well-known Japanese artists.
Who paid for ukiyo-e paintings?
Little record of the patrons of ukiyo-e paintings has survived. They sold for considerably higher prices than prints—up to many thousands of times more, and thus must have been purchased by the wealthy, likely merchants and perhaps some from the samurai class.
How many versions of the ukiyo-e Ruikō are there?
The work did not see print during the Edo era, but circulated in hand-copied editions that were subject to numerous additions and alterations; over 120 variants of the Ukiyo-e Ruikō are known. Before World War II, the predominant view of ukiyo-e stressed the centrality of prints; this viewpoint ascribes ukiyo-e’s founding to Moronobu.
What is the significance of the ukiyo-e bathing scene?
Bathing was an important ritual in Japanese culture and communal bathhouse scenes were incorporated into ukiyo-e’s everyday subject matter as one of the few to include treatment of the nude. The print is a double sheet print, with four women on the left side and four on the right, one of whom is washing a baby.