page_title: Ukiyo-e
section_title: Introduction to the West
hierarchical_section_title: Ukiyo-e / History / Introduction to the West
caption_attribution_description: English: Claude Debussy saw to publication two editions of the full score of La mer. The first was published by Durand in 1905 and bore the famous reproduction of Hokusai's Wave "in various shades of green, blue, tan, and beige" on the cover page. Français&#160;: Claude Debussy, partition de "La Mer"&#160;: 5 mars 1905 est la date indiquée sur la particelle de La Mer ainsi que sur la partition d'orchestre, signalant l'achèvement de l'œuvre qui sera éditée en juillet et mise dans le commerce en novembre, avec la couverture en couleurs d'après Hokusai.
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: Aside from Dutch traders, who had had trading relations dating to the beginning of the Edo period, Westerners paid little notice to Japanese art before the mid-19th century, and when they did they rarely distinguished it from other art from the East.  Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg spent a year in the Dutch trading settlement Dejima, near Nagasaki, and was one of the earliest Westerners to collect Japanese prints.  The export of ukiyo-e thereafter slowly grew, and at the beginning of the 19th century Dutch merchant-trader Isaac Titsingh's collection drew the attention of connoisseurs of art in Paris.
  The arrival in Edo of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 led to the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, which opened Japan to the outside world after over two centuries of seclusion.  Ukiyo-e prints were amongst the items he brought back to the United States.  Such prints had appeared in Paris from at least the 1830s, and by the 1850s were numerous; reception was mixed, and even when praised ukiyo-e was generally thought inferior to Western works which emphasized mastery of naturalistic perspective and anatomy.  Japanese art drew notice at the International Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, and became fashionable in France and England in the 1870s and 1880s.  The prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige played a prominent role in shaping Western perceptions of Japanese art.  At the time of their introduction to the West, woodblock printing was the most common mass medium in Japan, and the Japanese considered it of little lasting value.
  Early Europeans promoters and scholars of ukiyo-e and Japanese art included writer Edmond de Goncourt and art critic Philippe Burty, who coined the term "Japonism".  Stores selling Japanese goods opened, including those of Édouard Desoye in 1862 and art dealer Siegfried Bing in 1875.  From 1888 to 1891 Bing published the magazine Artistic Japan in English, French, and German editions, and curated an ukiyo-e exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890 attended by artists such as Mary Cassatt.
  American Ernest Fenollosa was the earliest Western devotee of Japanese culture, and did much to promote Japanese art—Hokusai's works featured prominently at his inaugural exhibition as first curator of Japanese art Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in Tokyo in 1898 he curated the first ukiyo-e exhibition in Japan. By the end of the 19th century, the popularity of ukiyo-e in the West drove prices beyond the means of most collectors—some, such as Degas, traded their own paintings for such prints.  Tadamasa Hayashi was a prominent Paris-based dealer of respected tastes whose Tokyo office was responsible for evaluating and exporting large quantities of ukiyo-e prints to the West in such quantities that Japanese critics later accused him of siphoning Japan of its national treasure.  The drain first went unnoticed in Japan, as Japanese artists were immersing themselves in the classical painting techniques of the West.
  Japanese art, and particularly ukiyo-e prints, came to influence Western art from the time of the early Impressionists.  Early painter-collectors incorporated Japanese themes and compositional techniques into their works as early as the 1860s: the patterned wallpapers and rugs in Manet's paintings were inspired by ukiyo-e's patterned kimonos, and Whistler focused his attention on ephemeral elements of nature as in ukiyo-e landscapes.  Van Gogh was an avid collector, and painted copies in oil of prints by Hiroshige and Eisen.  Degas and Cassatt depicted fleeting, everyday moments in Japanese-influenced compositions and perspectives.  Ukiyo-e's flat perspective and unmodulated colours were a particular influence on graphic designers and poster makers.  Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs displayed his interest not only in ukiyo-e's flat colours and outlined forms, but also in their subject matter: performers and prostitutes.  He signed much of this work with his initials in a circle, imitating the seals on Japanese prints.  Other artists of the time who drew influence from ukiyo-e include Monet, La Farge,
caption: Not only the visual arts but also music drew inspiration from ukiyo-e in the West: cover of the orchestral score of Debussy's La mer (1905).
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