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'.
Teiichi Fukuda, also known as Ryōtarō Shiba, was a Japanese author. He is best known for his novels about historical events in Japan and on the Northeast Asian sub-continent, as well as his historical and cultural essays pertaining to Japan and its relationship to the rest of the world.
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.
Rangaku, and by extension Yōgaku, is a body of knowledge developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave of Dejima, which allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners from 1641 to 1853 because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation (sakoku).
Nishiki-e is a type of Japanese multi-coloured woodblock printing; the technique is used primarily in ukiyo-e. It was invented in the 1760s, and perfected and popularized by the printmaker Suzuki Harunobu, who produced many nishiki-e prints between 1765 and his death five years later.
Bijin-ga is a generic term for pictures of beautiful women in Japanese art, especially in woodblock printing of the ukiyo-e genre.
Kitao Shigemasa was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist from Edo. He was one of the leading printmakers of his day, but his works have been slightly obscure. He is noted for images of beautiful women (bijinga). He was taught by Shigenaga and has been referred to as "a chameleon" who adapted to changing styles. He was less active after the rise of Torii Kiyonaga and produced relatively few works considering the length of his career. He is also noted for his haikai (poetry) and shodō. In his later years he used the studio name Kosuisai.
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.
Utagawa Kunimasa was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Utagawa school. He was originally from Aizu in Iwashiro Province and first worked in a dye shop after arriving in Edo. It was there that he was noticed by Utagawa Toyokuni, to whom he became apprenticed.
Miyagawa Chōshun was a Japanese painter in the ukiyo-e style. Founder of the Miyagawa school, he and his pupils are among the few ukiyo-e artists to have never created woodblock prints. He was born in Miyagawa, in Owari Province, but lived much of his later life in Edo, where he died.
Woodblock printing in Japan is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre of single sheets, but it was also used for printing books in the same period. Invented in China during the Tang dynasty, woodblock printing was widely adopted in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868). It is similar to woodcut in Western printmaking in some regards, but was widely used for text as well as images. The Japanese mokuhanga technique differs in that it uses water-based inks—as opposed to Western woodcut, which typically uses oil-based inks. The Japanese water-based inks provide a wide range of vivid colors, glazes, and transparency.
Akita ranga (秋田蘭画), also known as the Akita-ha (秋田派), was a short-lived school of painting within the larger Japanese genre of ranga, or Dutch-style painting which lasted roughly from 1773 to 1780. Based in Kubota Domain, a feudal domain, in the Tōhoku region of Honshū, northern Japan, in what is now Akita Prefecture, it was headed by the domain's lord Satake Shozan and his retainer Odano Naotake. Though many ranga artists, most prominently Shiba Kōkan, produced works on European themes, the Akita painters for the most part painted traditional Japanese themes and compositions using Western-style techniques and an approximation of oil paints.
Caspar Schamberger was a German surgeon. His name represents the first school of Western medicine in Japan and the beginning of rangaku, or Dutch studies.
Ukiyo-e artists may be organized into schools, which consist of a founding artist and those artists who were taught by or strongly influenced by him. Artists of the Osaka school are united both stylistically and geographically. Not all of these artists designed woodblock prints, and some ukiyo-e artists had more than one teacher, and others are not known to be associated with any particular school.
Yoshio Kōsaku, also known as Yoshio Kōgyū was a Japanese physician and scholar of "Dutch studies" (Rangaku), and the chief Dutch translator in Nagasaki, often accompanying Dutch East India Company officials on missions to Edo and other official business.
Sō Shiseki was a Japanese painter of the Nagasaki and Nanpin schools.
Hendrik Caspar Romberg was a Dutch bookkeeper, merchant-trader and VOC Opperhoofd in Japan.
Snow, Moon and Flowers is a Japanese expression and theme in art and design originating from a poem by Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. It became popular in the late Edo period. It is a Japanese metonym for beautiful sceneries in nature.
Zashiki Hakkei is a series of eight prints from 1766 by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Suzuki Harunobu. They were the first full-colour nishiki-e prints and are considered representative examples of Harunobu's work. The prints are mitate-e parodies of popular themes of the 11th-century Chinese landscape painting series, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang; Harunobu replaces natural scenery with domestic scenes.
Nishimura Shigenaga was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist.
