CategoriesStyles and Movements
Japanese Erotic Prints
Shunga: erotic woodblock prints, illustrated books and painted scrolls of Edo-period Japan, made by many leading ukiyo-e artists.
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About
Shunga, literally 'spring pictures', were produced in great numbers during the Edo period (1603–1868), mostly as woodblock-printed books and albums, alongside costlier hand-painted scrolls. The same artists who designed prints of actors, courtesans and landscapes made them. Though periodically banned by the shogunate, they circulated widely and often mix erotic scenes with humour, parody and passages of dialogue.
Hishikawa Moronobu and Sugimura Jihei filled whole pages with bold black line in the late 1600s. Nishikawa Sukenobu in Kyoto brought gentler, domestic scenes in the 1700s, and Suzuki Harunobu's full-colour prints of the 1760s showed slender, youthful lovers. Isoda Koryūsai and Kitagawa Utamaro followed; Utamaro's Poem of the Pillow (1788) is among the most admired albums. In the 1800s Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Kuniyoshi produced many illustrated books. After the Meiji government suppressed shunga, the genre was long kept out of public view, and open scholarly study is comparatively recent.
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