page_title: Ukiyo-e
section_title: Criticism and historiography
hierarchical_section_title: Ukiyo-e / Criticism and historiography
caption_attribution_description: English: Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), American orientalist. About 1890
context_page_description: 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. The term ukiyo-e translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
  Edo became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century. The merchant class at the bottom of the social order, which benefited the most from city's rapid economic growth, began to indulge in the entertainments of kabuki theatre, geisha, and courtesans of the pleasure districts; the term ukiyo came to describe this hedonistic lifestyle. Printed or painted ukiyo-e works emerged in the late 17th century and were popular with the merchant class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them.
  The earliest ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s with Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints of beautiful women. Colour in prints came gradually—at first only added by hand for special commissions.
context_section_description: Contemporary records of ukiyo-e artists are rare.  The most significant is the Ukiyo-e Ruikō ("Various Thoughts on Ukiyo-e"), a collection of commentaries and artist biographies.  Ōta Nanpo compiled the first, no-longer-extant version around 1790.  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.  Following the war, thinking turned to the importance of ukiyo-e painting and making direct connections with 17th-century Yamato-e paintings; this viewpoint sees Matabei as the genre's originator, and is especially favoured in Japan.  This view had become widespread among Japanese researchers by the 1930s, but the militaristic government of the time suppressed it, wanting to emphasize a division between the Yamato-e scroll paintings associated with the court, and the prints associated with the sometimes anti-authoritarian merchant class.
  The earliest comprehensive historical and critical works on ukiyo-e came from the West.  Ernest Fenollosa was Professor of Philosophy at the Imperial University in Tokyo from 1878, and was Commissioner of Fine Arts to the Japanese government from 1886.  His Masters of Ukioye of 1896 was the first comprehensive overview and set the stage for most later works with an approach to the history in terms of epochs: beginning with Matabei in a primitive age, it evolved towards a late-18th-century golden age that began to decline with the advent of Utamaro, and had a brief revival with Hokusai and Hiroshige's landscapes in the 1830s.  Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote an account in Painting in the Far East in 1908 that was similar to Fenollosa's, but placed Utamaro and Sharaku amongst the masters.  Arthur Davison Ficke built on the works of Fenollosa and Binyon with a more comprehensive Chats on Japanese Prints in 1915.  James A. Michener's The Floating World in 1954 broadly followed the chronologies of the earlier works, while dropping classifications into periods and recognizing the earlier artists not as primitives but as accomplished masters emerging from earlier painting traditions.  For Michener and his sometime collaborator Richard Lane, ukiyo-e began with Moronobu rather than Matabei.  Lane's Masters of the Japanese Print of 1962 maintained the approach of period divisions while placing ukiyo-e firmly within the genealogy of Japanese art.  The book acknowledges artists such as Yoshitoshi and Kiyochika as late masters.
  Seiichirō Takahashi's Traditional Woodblock Prints of Japan of 1964 placed ukiyo-e artists in three periods: the first was a primitive period that included Harunobu, followed by a golden age of Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Sharaku, and then a closing period of decline following the declaration beginning in the 1790s of strict sumptuary laws that dictated what could be depicted in artworks.  The book nevertheless recognizes a larger number of masters from throughout this last period than earlier works had, and viewed ukiyo-e painting as a revival of Yamato-e painting.  Tadashi Kobayashi further refined Takahashi's analysis by identifying the decline as coinciding with the desperate attempts of the shogunate to hold on to power through the passing of draconian laws as its hold on the country continued to break down, culminating in the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
  Ukiyo-e scholarship has tended to focus on the cataloguing of artists, an approach that lacks the rigour and originality that has come to be applied to art analysis in other areas.  Such catalogues are numerous, but tend overwhelmingly to concentrate on a group of recognized geniuses.  Little original research has been added to the early, foundational evaluations of ukiyo-e and its artists, especially with regard to relatively minor artists.  While the commercial nature of ukiyo-e has always been 
caption: American scholar of Japanese art Ernest Fenollosa was the first to complete a comprehensive critical history of ukiyo-e.
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