Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art that 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'.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was a Japanese printmaker.
Suzuki Harunobu was a Japanese designer of woodblock print art in the ukiyo-e style. He was an innovator, the first to produce full-color prints in 1765, rendering obsolete the former modes of two- and three-color prints. Harunobu used many special techniques, and depicted a wide variety of subjects, from classical poems to contemporary beauties. Like many artists of his day, Harunobu also produced a number of shunga, or erotic images. During his lifetime and shortly afterwards, many artists imitated his style. A few, such as Harushige, even boasted of their ability to forge the work of the great master. Much about Harunobu's life is unknown.
Shunga (春画) is a type of Japanese erotic art typically executed as a kind of ukiyo-e, often in woodblock print format. While rare, there are also extant erotic painted handscrolls which predate ukiyo-e. Translated literally, the Japanese word shunga means picture of spring; "spring" is a common euphemism for sex.
Shinsui Itō was the pseudonym of a Nihonga painter and ukiyo-e woodblock print artist in Taishō- and Shōwa-period Japan. He was one of the great names of the shin-hanga art movement, which revitalized the traditional art after it began to decline with the advent of photography in the early 20th century. His real name was Itō Hajime.
Shin-hanga was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, that revitalized the traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods. It maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor, as opposed to the parallel sōsaku-hanga movement.
Torii Kiyonaga was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Torii school. Originally Sekiguchi Shinsuke, the son of an Edo bookseller, from Motozaimokuchō Itchōme in Edo, he took on Torii Kiyonaga as an art name. Although not biologically related to the Torii family, he became head of the group after the death of his adoptive father and teacher Torii Kiyomitsu.
Isoda Koryūsai was a Japanese ukiyo-e print designer and painter active from 1769 to 1790.
Sugimura Jihei was a Japanese ukiyo-e printmaker who flourished from approximately 1681 to 1703. He is noted by art historian and ukiyo-e collector Richard Lane as an “indirect pupil” of Hishikawa Moronobu. Much of Sugimura's work was once attributed to fellow followers of Moronobu, or Moronobu himself. In the 1920s, however, unsigned prints were discovered to have hidden signatures of Sugimura's incorporated in the drawing of the clothing folds. It appears Sugimura preferred to sign with his surname rather than his given name.
Hiroki Morinoue is an American artist of Japanese descent who has helped to pioneer in the United States the fusion of western Impressionism with modern Japanese design.
Kamigata (上方) was the colloquial term for a region today called Kansai in Japan. This large area encompasses the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. The term was also sometimes used to refer only to Kyoto city. The term is used particularly when discussing elements of Edo period urban culture such as ukiyo-e and kabuki, and when making a comparison to the urban culture of the Edo/Tokyo region. The term was no longer used as name for the Kansai provinces when Emperor Meiji moved to Edo in 1868. An account described Kamigata suji as one of the two regions that emerged from the division of Japan for the purpose of taxation with the other being Kwanto-suji.
Charles William Bartlett was an English painter and printmaker who settled in Hawaii.
Tadashi Nakayama was a Japanese woodblock print artist, working in a style that combines influences from traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints and Western painting.
Ishikawa Toyonobu was a Japanese ukiyo-e print artist. He is sometimes said to have been the same person as Nishimura Shigenobu, a contemporary ukiyo-e artist and student of Nishimura Shigenaga about whom very little is known.
Richard Douglas Lane (1926–2002) was an American art critic, collector, dealer, historian, and writer. He was dealer of Japanese art, lived in Japan for much of his life, and had a long association with the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, which now holds his vast art collection.
Utagawa Toyoharu was a Japanese artist in the ukiyo-e genre, known as the founder of the Utagawa school and for his uki-e pictures that incorporated Western-style geometrical perspective to create a sense of depth.
Lilian May Miller was an American painter, woodblock printmaker and poet born in Tokyo, Japan. In the world of art she marked her place with imagery, while she attended presentations in traditional kimonos, and signed her paintings with a monogram.
Hari-shigoto is a colour triptych print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro. It depicts women working with cloth at home with children playing around them. Critics hold the prints in high regard, in particular the skill required to reproduce the translucent effect of the cloth with woodblock prints.
Fujin Tomari-kyaku no Zu Sanmai-tsuzuki is a triptych print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro. It depicts a group of women within a mosquito net preparing for an overnight visit.
Clifton Karhu was an American artist of Finnish heritage who settled in Japan after serving there in the U.S. military during World War II and returning as a missionary. He became locally and internationally renowned for his woodblock prints, inspired by ukiyo-e, which he began making in the early 1960s and produced until his death. Karhu became known for using traditional Japanese printmaking methods to create contemporary bold and colorful landscapes of Kyoto and Kanazawa. Karhu became the first foreign member of the Japan Print Association. Japanese media began to describe him as being "more Japanese than a Japanese," because of his adherence to traditional methods of print production.
