Masters of Ukiyo-e: Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kunisada, Kuniyoshi and Yoshitoshi ~ Article 6
There Was Never One Ukiyo-e Style
Place several Japanese woodblock prints beside one another and their differences can be more revealing than their similarities.
One artist builds an image around the rhythm of people moving through a landscape. Another creates an atmosphere of extraordinary stillness. One fills the page with theatrical presence; another pushes narrative toward fantasy and spectacle. By the late nineteenth century, still another uses the medium to explore an increasingly modern Japan.
The Bai Win Collection includes works associated with five artists who demonstrate this remarkable range: Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
They were not five members of a single generation. Their careers overlap, but collectively they take us from the flourishing print culture of the early nineteenth century toward the profound changes of the Meiji era.
Rather than asking which artist was greatest, this final article asks something more useful:
What did each artist see that the others did not?
Hokusai
The Restless Observer
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) had one of the longest and most varied careers in Japanese art.
Landscape made him internationally famous, but concentrating exclusively on The Great Wave gives a distorted impression of his work. Hokusai drew almost everything: people at work, animals, plants, architecture, religious subjects, legendary figures and the seemingly insignificant incidents of ordinary existence.
What repeatedly emerges is curiosity. His figures rarely seem placed in a landscape merely to establish scale. They are occupied. They bend, carry, walk, converse and react to their surroundings.
That quality can be seen particularly well in Hokusai’s earlier travel imagery represented in the Bai Win Collection. He appears interested not simply in what a place looks like, but in what people do when they are there. It is an observational instinct that would remain central to his art throughout his extraordinarily long career.
CHB-94 — Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri
The Hokusai You Don’t Expect
The fame of one masterpiece can sometimes overwhelm an artist’s other achievements. Hokusai’s name now produces an almost automatic mental image: a towering blue wave curling above small boats with Mount Fuji in the distance. Yet his career stretched across approximately seven decades and included thousands of designs.
The Bai Win prints offer an opportunity to encounter him without beginning with his most famous composition. Smaller travel scenes reveal humor, human interaction and a fascination with the routines of daily life. This is an important way to approach a famous artist.
Rather than asking whether an unfamiliar print resembles the Hokusai we already know, we can allow it to expand our definition of Hokusai. Great artists are rarely represented adequately by their greatest hits.
Hiroshige
Weather, Distance and Silence
Where Hokusai can feel energetic and inquisitive, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) often invites the eye to slow down. He became one of the defining landscape artists of nineteenth-century Japan, repeatedly exploring famous places, roads and seasonal change.
But location alone does not explain his appeal. Hiroshige could make weather into subject matter. Rain, mist, snow and evening light alter the emotional character of a place. Figures sometimes become tiny presences within a much larger environment. A bridge, tree, shoreline or distant horizon can organize an entire composition.
The Bai Win print of Tomigaoka Hachiman Shrine at Fukagawa provides an opportunity to consider this different sensibility. The importance of such images lies not merely in recording where something stood.
Hiroshige understood that the same place is never visually quite the same twice. Season, weather and hour transform it.
CHB-33 — Utagawa Hiroshige I, Tomigaoka Hachiman Shrine at Fukagawa
Seeing Through Hiroshige’s Eyes
One reason Hiroshige later fascinated European artists was his willingness to construct landscapes in ways that could seem unexpected to Western eyes.
A large foreground element might partially obstruct the view. A road could disappear abruptly. A bridge might cut diagonally across the composition. Human figures could be reduced to a few carefully placed marks.
These were not failed attempts at Western perspective. They represented another way of organizing visual space. Hiroshige frequently asks us to look past, through or around something before reaching the distance.
That device creates an intriguing sensation: we are not hovering outside the scene. We seem to occupy a particular viewpoint within it. The landscape becomes an experience rather than a diagram.
Kunisada
The Designer of Appearance (CHB-04)
We have already encountered Utagawa Kunisada I (1786–1865) extensively in this series, so there is no need to retell his career here. Instead, look at one characteristic.
Surface.
Kunisada could make a sheet visually luxurious through patterned robes, contrasting textiles, decorative interiors and carefully balanced blocks of color.
Remove the identity of the performer for a moment and examine the print almost abstractly. Pattern sits against pattern. A diagonal sleeve interrupts a vertical figure. Areas of saturated color alternate with exposed paper. Clothing becomes part of the architecture of the image.
This helps explain why Kunisada’s prints remain visually compelling even when the theatrical references are no longer immediately understood.
His actors occupy roles. But they also inhabit remarkably sophisticated designs.
Read Article 2: Utagawa Kunisada — Master of Japanese Ukiyo-e and Kabuki Prints.
Kuniyoshi
When Imagination Takes Over
If Hokusai observes and Hiroshige contemplates, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) frequently seems determined to entertain. Warriors, heroes, legends, supernatural creatures and dramatic episodes offered him a vast imaginative territory.
Kuniyoshi was particularly celebrated for warrior imagery, but reducing him to “the warrior artist” misses much of his inventiveness. His work could be playful, strange, humorous and spectacular. He experimented with visual puzzles and unexpected compositions and had a particular ability to make narrative burst beyond the normal confines of a sheet.
His pictures often invite a different response from Hiroshige’s landscapes. We do not simply enter them. We want to know what happens next.
That narrative energy connects Kuniyoshi to the popular stories from which he drew, while his visual invention ensures that the image can survive even when the original tale is unfamiliar.
The Art of Exaggeration
Realism is not always the objective. A warrior may be more imposing than life. Movement can become almost impossible. Fabric sweeps through space. Facial expression intensifies. Nature itself may appear to participate in the drama. Kuniyoshi understood exaggeration as a visual tool.
The principle is familiar today from comics and cinema: a storyteller can depart from literal reality in order to make an event feel more immediate. That does not make the image unsophisticated. Quite the opposite.
Kuniyoshi had to control complex compositions so that the eye could still understand them despite the abundance of movement and detail. Spectacle works only when the artist knows where to direct our attention.
CHB-13 — Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1852
Yoshitoshi
Ukiyo-e at the Edge of Modern Japan
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) belongs to another moment. He was born near the end of the Tokugawa period and lived through the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan underwent extraordinary political, technological and social transformation.
Photography appeared. Western printing technologies expanded. Clothing, architecture and urban life changed. Yet Yoshitoshi continued to find possibilities in woodblock printing.
His subjects frequently looked backward—to history, warriors, literature, ghosts and legend—but his visual sensibility could feel strikingly new. Dramatic cropping, psychological tension and unusual viewpoints give many of his later works an intensity distinctly different from prints produced half a century earlier.
The Bai Win 1885 image of Shinchūnagon Taira no Tomomori belongs to this late phase of nineteenth-century printmaking. Its historical subject looks into Japan’s past. The artist who created it was living through Japan’s future.
CHB-34 — Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Shinchūnagon Taira no Tomomori, 1885
An Ending That Wasn’t an Ending
Yoshitoshi is frequently described as one of the last great masters of traditional ukiyo-e. There is some truth in the description—but it can also be misleading.
Japanese woodblock printing did not simply stop with Yoshitoshi. The twentieth century saw new approaches, including shin-hanga, in which artists, carvers, printers and publishers revitalized traditional techniques while responding to modern tastes and international collectors.
Artists such as Kawase Hasui and Tsuchiya Kōitsu carried landscape printmaking into a new century, using the traditional collaborative woodblock process to explore modern Japan through changing light, weather, streets and landscape.
That makes Yoshitoshi better understood not simply as an ending, but as a threshold. The world in which ukiyo-e had developed was disappearing. Woodblock printing itself was about to find new lives.
After Ukiyo-e
The history of Japanese woodblock printing did not conclude in the nineteenth century.
Artists of the twentieth century inherited a medium already transformed by generations of experimentation. The circumstances were different. So were the audiences. But carved wood, pigment and paper remained capable of producing something photography could not replace. That continuation gives us a natural place to end this series.
We began by asking what ukiyo-e was. We end by seeing that Japanese woodblock printing was never a single moment frozen in time. It was a visual tradition capable of changing with the people who used it.
Rain, reflected light and the glow of a great red lantern transform a narrow Tokyo street into an atmospheric night scene. A work of the shin-hanga movement, the print demonstrates how the collaborative Japanese woodblock tradition continued to develop in the twentieth century. Japanese color woodblock print, ink and color on paper. Bai Win Collection.
CHB-179. Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870–1949), Ushigome Kagurazaka (Evening at Ushigome), designed 1939, later edition.
Five Artists, Five Ways of Seeing
Return now to the five prints at the beginning of this article. The differences become easier to recognize.
Hokusai watches people interacting with the world around them. Hiroshige makes us conscious of atmosphere, distance and place. Kunisada turns appearance, costume and figure into design. Kuniyoshi pushes storytelling toward spectacle. Yoshitoshi brings historical imagery into dialogue with a rapidly changing age.
These are not rigid definitions. Each artist was far more versatile than a single sentence can convey. But learning to recognize those differences is one of the pleasures of looking at a collection rather than an isolated masterpiece.
Eventually, the label becomes less necessary. You begin to recognize the hand.
Curator’s Assessment
Working through the Bai Win prints individually has changed the way I see the collection collectively.
Initially, artist, title and date can dominate the cataloguing process. Once enough works have been examined side by side, other distinctions emerge.
Hokusai begins to feel different from Hiroshige before we read the signature. Kunisada’s handling of figure and textile becomes recognizable. Kuniyoshi’s narrative instincts announce themselves. Yoshitoshi belongs visibly to another moment. That is when a catalogue begins to become a collection. Individual objects start communicating with one another.
There are still unidentified prints, uncertain impressions and questions requiring further research within the Bai Win holdings. Those unresolved objects are not peripheral to the project. They are part of what makes it interesting. Because the next print we identify may change how we understand the ones we already know.
From the Curator’s Desk
Adam McMillan 年安瀾
Curator, Bai Win Collection
Article 6 of a 6-part campaign about Ukiyo-e: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Floating World. All prints shown are part of the Bai Win Collection.
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