JAPANESE WOODBLOCKS

Antique Japanese Woodblock Prints — Ukiyo-e

This category brings together original Japanese woodblock prints from the great era of ukiyo-e production, spanning the Edo period (1603-1868) and the Meiji era (1868-1912). These works represent one of the supreme achievements of world printmaking — a tradition in which the technical refinements of the colour woodblock process were brought to a level of sophistication unmatched in any other printmaking culture, producing images of extraordinary visual complexity, chromatic richness and artistic expressiveness.

The ukiyo-e tradition encompassed a wide range of subjects, each with its own history and its own canon of celebrated practitioners. Bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), yakusha-e (actor prints), musha-e (warrior prints), landscape subjects, bird-and-flower compositions (kachoga) and genre scenes of everyday urban life each generated specialist artists whose work defined the visual possibilities of the form. The great names of ukiyo-e — Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Sharaku, Kuniyoshi, Kunisada and their predecessors and successors — produced bodies of work of extraordinary range and quality that remain among the most sought-after original prints in the world collector market.

The technical production of Japanese woodblock prints involved a division of labour between the artist who designed the composition, the block-cutters who translated the design into carved wooden blocks, and the printers who applied the colours in sequence to produce the finished print. The finest Edo-period prints were produced in this collaborative process to standards of precision and refinement that have never been replicated, using pigments of great subtlety and paper of exceptional quality. The characteristic bokashi (gradated) printing, the use of mica grounds, embossing and other special techniques that distinguish the finest examples add further layers of craft and visual interest.

The influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Western art was transformative. The japonisme movement that swept European and American art from the 1860s onwards drew directly on the formal innovations of ukiyo-e — its bold outlines, flat colour areas, asymmetric compositions and rejection of Western perspective — in ways that shaped Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the development of modern graphic design.

Antique Japanese woodblock prints are collected worldwide for their extraordinary artistic quality, their historical significance as documents of Edo and Meiji Japan, and the unique technical tradition they embody. As original period works, they represent one of the great areas of the world print market.