However, the 20th century saw a revival in Japanese printmaking: the shin-hanga ('new prints') genre capitalized on Western interest in prints of traditional Japanese scenes, and the sōsaku-hanga ('creative prints') movement promoted individualist works designed, carved, and printed by a single artist. Following the deaths of these two masters, and against the technological and social modernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, ukiyo-e production went into steep decline. The 19th century also saw the continuation of masters of the ukiyo-e tradition, with the creation of the artist Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of the most well-known works of Japanese art, and the artist Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Specialists have prized the portraits of beauties and actors by masters such as Torii Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Sharaku that came in the late 18th century. As printing was done by hand, printers were able to achieve effects impractical with machines, such as the blending or gradation of colours on the printing block. Artists rarely carved their own woodblocks for printing rather, production was divided between the artist, who designed the prints, the carver, who cut the woodblocks, the printer, who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto handmade paper, and the publisher, who financed, promoted, and distributed the works. Some ukiyo-e artists specialized in making paintings, but most works were prints. In the 1760s, the success of Suzuki Harunobu's "brocade prints" led to full-colour production becoming standard, with ten or more blocks used to create each print. By the 1740s, artists such as Okumura Masanobu used multiple woodblocks to print areas of colour. Colour prints were introduced gradually, and at first were only used for special commissions. The earliest ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s, with Hishikawa Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints of beautiful women. Printed or painted ukiyo-e works were popular with the chōnin class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them. ![]() The chōnin class (merchants, craftsmen and workers), positioned at the bottom of the social order, benefited the most from the city's rapid economic growth, and began to indulge in and patronize the entertainment of kabuki theatre, geisha, and courtesans of the pleasure districts the term ukiyo ('floating world') came to describe this hedonistic lifestyle. In 1603, the city of Edo ( Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The term ukiyo-e ( 浮世絵) translates as 'picture of the floating world'. 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. ![]() Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries.
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