CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Edo Art
Japanese art of the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603–1868: Kano and Rinpa screens, literati painting, ukiyo-e prints, porcelain and lacquer.
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About
The Edo period runs from 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu founded the shogunate, to 1868. Long internal peace and the booming city of Edo, now Tokyo, produced art for very different audiences. Painters of the Kano school supplied castles and temples with an official style; the Rinpa painters Ogata Kōrin and, later, Sakai Hōitsu set bold, flattened plants and waves on gold-leaf screens; literati artists such as Ike no Taiga adapted Chinese scholar painting; and Itō Jakuchū painted birds and flowers in obsessive detail.
The townspeople's taste found its form in ukiyo-e, pictures of the 'floating world' of theatre, pleasure quarters and travel. Suzuki Harunobu led the move to full-colour woodblock prints in 1765, Kitagawa Utamaro specialised in close-up portraits of women in the 1790s, and Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (about 1831) and Utagawa Hiroshige's Tōkaidō views made landscape popular. Porcelain, lacquer, netsuke and kimono design flourished alongside.