Japanese
Woodblock Prints
Kathleen Doster
74
Japanese woodblock prints, with their bright colors and instantly recognizable designs (who hasn’t seen Hiroshige’s “Great Wave” curving around Mount Fuji in the distance) are one of the most popular Japanese art forms. Woodblock prints were dispersed rapidly around the world upon the opening of Japan at the end of the Edo era, and introduced the West to the unique beauty of Japanese culture. The prints continue to be avidly collected and prized today as distinctively Japanese works of art. The most valued prints, those from the Edo period, are known as ukiyo-e and can be found both online and in specialty shops in Tokyo, Kyoto and other Japanese cities. Printing made from carved, inked, wooden blocks were introduced to Japan from China around the 8th century AD, and were initially used only for written texts, then, beginning from the 11th century, for black line drawings of Buddhist pictures. Still later, these line drawings were sometimes colored in by hand to produce colored pictures but colored printing wasn’t developed until the early 18th century.
The stability and prosperity of the Edo period led to the rise of a literate and sophisticated merchant class with more secular tastes in art. This gave birth to ukiyo-e, literally, pictures of the ukiyo, or “floating world”, a lovely euphemism for the pleasure quarters, whose teahouses, courtesans, and kabuki actors were popular topics of paintings, drawings and woodblock prints. By 1744, new printing techniques allowed printers to stamp a single sheet of paper using multiple woodblocks, one for each of up to 20 colors, leading to the richly multicolored prints known as nishiki-e (brocade pictures). The Japanese print artists, who often started as painters, worked with a team of craftsmen to produce woodblock prints. After the artist completed the original drawing, a copyist would outline the drawing onto a thin sheet of paper. The engraver then pasted this to a block of cherry wood and carved down the surface everywhere except the outlines; this became the key block. Another block would be carved for every color. The printer would then place ink on the remaining raised pattern of
