What is nishiki-e (ukiyo-e)?
Explainer
What is nishiki-e (ukiyo-e)?
Nishiki-e began with calendars. In 1765, picture calendars called egoyomi were all the rage, and nishiki-e grew out of the ones designed by Suzuki Harunobu. The colorful woodblock prints most people picture when they hear "ukiyo-e" can be traced back to the calendars of that year.
Prints to rival brocade
Nishiki-e are ukiyo-e woodblock prints in many colors. They were first made in 1765 by Harunobu working together with carvers and printers. The name means "brocade pictures": the fine, many-colored printing was said to be as beautiful as brocade cloth. They also went by other names, such as azuma nishiki-e, "brocade pictures of the east" (written 東錦絵 or 吾妻錦絵), and Edo-e, "Edo pictures."
Prints of the here and now
The "ukiyo" in ukiyo-e first meant "the world of today, the present age." In the Edo period, it also came to mean the world of fun and pleasure. Ukiyo-e prints were made in large numbers and sold fairly cheaply. Pictures of beautiful women and of kabuki actors were among the most common. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido are nishiki-e too. The Tokyo National Museum holds prints from both series.
A single print took many hands. A publisher, called a hanmoto, planned the print, and the designer, the carver and the printer each did their part to finish it. As multicolor nishiki-e developed, the printers of Edo worked out new techniques of their own.
Newspaper prints in the Meiji era, and the shin-hanga that came later
Nishiki-e kept being made after the Meiji era began. In 1874, Ochiai Yoshiiku put out the first nishiki-e newspaper, and current events, a subject that had been restricted in the Edo period, could now appear in prints.
Meiji nishiki-e went two ways. One was kaika-e, pictures of Japan's rush to modernize. The other was pictures of beautiful women that looked back fondly on Edo.
Decades later, something new came out of a print shop. Watanabe Shozaburo opened his shop in Kyobashi, Tokyo, in 1909, and in 1915 he launched shin-hanga, "new prints," separate from nishiki-e. That was exactly 150 years after Harunobu and his carvers and printers started making nishiki-e. Watanabe brought in young artists such as Ito Shinsui and Kawase Hasui. Like ukiyo-e prints, shin-hanga were made by a designer, a carver and a printer working in turn, and printed by hand, which made their complex colors possible.
Ukiyo-e overseas
It wasn't only people in Japan who took notice of ukiyo-e. Hokusai influenced Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and other Impressionist and later painters, and his work fed into Japonisme in France.
Large collections of ukiyo-e are in the United States as well. The Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress holds Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th to the early 20th century, by Hiroshige as well as Kuniyoshi, Sadahide, Yoshiiku and others. The collection is strongest in ukiyo-e and in Yokohama-e, which, as the name suggests, are pictures of Yokohama. The Library's Japanese prints came from gifts by Justice Holmes, President Taft and others. In 2001, the Library also put the online exhibition "The Floating World of Ukiyo-E" on its website.
How it connects to 3rd-Party.jp
On Kioku Kabegami, you can take your time with nishiki-e of famous places from the Edo to the Meiji era, as if you were visiting them, without making a wallpaper at all. We chose them from items the National Diet Library marks "Internet available (copyright expired)" and from the Japanese ukiyo-e held by the Library of Congress. A few aren't nishiki-e: there are some shin-hanga from the Taisho era on, some Meiji lithographs, and some paintings done with a brush. The description on each page says which is which, and you can filter the list to show only Shin-hanga or Lithographs. When you make a wallpaper, the picture is cropped to fit your screen and finished with the title and other text. Every print's page gives the item's name and links to its original record at the library that holds it, so open it to see the whole print before it was cropped.
Sources
- Famous Places in Japan in Nishiki-e and Photographs, column (Japanese) (opens in a new tab)National Diet Library online exhibition
- Fine Prints: Japanese, pre-1915 (opens in a new tab)Library of Congress
- Nishiki-e (Japanese) (opens in a new tab)Kotobank
- Ukiyo-e (Japanese) (opens in a new tab)Kotobank