page_title: Ukiyo-e
section_title: Colour prints (mid-18th century)
hierarchical_section_title: Ukiyo-e / History / Colour prints (mid-18th century)
caption_attribution_description: English: Okumura Masanobu - Taking the Evening Cool by Ryōgoku Bridge
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: Even in the earliest monochromatic prints and books, colour was added by hand for special commissions.  Demand for colour in the early-18th century was met with tan-e prints hand-tinted with orange and sometimes green or yellow.  These were followed in the 1720s with a vogue for pink-tinted beni-e and later the lacquer-like ink of the urushi-e.  In 1744, the benizuri-e were the first successes in colour printing, using multiple woodblocks—one for each colour, the earliest beni pink and vegetable green.
  A great self-promoter, Okumura Masanobu (1686–1764) played a major role during the period of rapid technical development in printing from the late 17th to mid-18th centuries.  He established a shop in 1707 and combined elements of the leading contemporary schools in a wide array of genres, though Masanobu himself belonged to no school.  Amongst the innovations in his romantic, lyrical images were the introduction of geometrical perspective in the uki-e genre in the 1740s; the long, narrow hashira-e prints; and the combination of graphics and literature in prints that included self-penned haiku poetry.
  Ukiyo-e reached a peak in the late 18th century with the advent of full-colour prints, developed after Edo returned to prosperity under Tanuma Okitsugu following a long depression.  These popular colour prints came to be called nishiki-e, or "brocade pictures", as their brilliant colours seemed to bear resemblance to imported Chinese Shuchiang brocades, known in Japanese as Shokkō nishiki.  The first to emerge were expensive calendar prints, printed with multiple blocks on very fine paper with heavy, opaque inks.  These prints had the number of days for each month hidden in the design, and were sent at the New Year as personalized greetings, bearing the name of the patron rather than the artist.  The blocks for these prints were later re-used for commercial production, obliterating the patron's name and replacing it with that of the artist.
  The delicate, romantic prints of Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770) were amongst the first to realize expressive and complex colour designs, printed with up to a dozen separate blocks to handle the different colours and half-tones.  His restrained, graceful prints invoked the classicism of waka poetry and Yamato-e painting.  The prolific Harunobu was the dominant ukiyo-e artist of his time.  The success of Harunobu's colourful nishiki-e from 1765 on led to a steep decline in demand for the limited palettes of benizuri-e and urushi-e, as well as hand-coloured prints.
  A trend against the idealism of the prints of Harunobu and the Torii school grew following Harunobu's death in 1770.  Katsukawa Shunshō (1726–1793) and his school produced portraits of kabuki actors with greater fidelity to the actors' actual features than had been the trend.  Sometime-collaborators Koryūsai (1735 – c. 1790) and Kitao Shigemasa (1739–1820) were prominent depicters of women who also moved ukiyo-e away from the dominance of Harunobu's idealism by focusing on contemporary urban fashions and celebrated real-world courtesans and geisha.  Koryūsai was perhaps the most prolific ukiyo-e artist of the 18th century, and produced a larger number of paintings and print series than any predecessor.  The Kitao school that Shigemasa founded was one of the dominant schools of the closing decades of the 18th century.
  In the 1770s, Utagawa Toyoharu produced a number of uki-e perspective prints that demonstrated a mastery of Western perspective techniques that had eluded his predecessors in the genre.  Toyoharu's works helped pioneer the landscape as an ukiyo-e subject, rather than merely a background for human figures  In 19th century, Western-style perspective techniques were absorbed into Japanese artistic culture, and deployed in the refined landscapes of such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige, the latter a member of the Utagawa school that Toyoharu founded.  This school was to become one of the most influential, and produced works in a far greater variety of genres than any other school.
caption: Western-style graphical perspective and increased use of printed colour were amongst the innovations Okumura Masanobu claimed.
  Taking the Evening Cool by Ryōgoku Bridge, c. 1745
exif: {}