The Origins of Ukiyo-e — Iwasa Matabei and Early Genre Painting

The Word “Ukiyo”

Ukiyo originally came from the Buddhist term “ukiyo (憂世)” — this world full of sadness. Until the Middle Ages it was a world-weary word. Entering the 17th century, it flipped into a bright word meaning “the floating world, the present of pleasure and fashion.”

Behind this reversal of meaning was the fact that, after the Sengoku era ended and the Edo shogunate was opened, nearly a century of peace arrived. Merchant culture blossomed in Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, and the sense of “enjoying the present” was accepted positively as a social attitude. Ukiyo-e is a picture of that “present.”

Iwasa Matabei — the Painter Called the “Ancestor of Ukiyo-e”

Iwasa Matabei (1578-1650) was a painter from a military family, born as the son of Araki Murashige. He worked in Kyoto, was later invited to the Fukui domain (the Matsudaira family), and died in Edo in his last years.

While studying the techniques of the Kanō school, Matabei was innovative in that he depicted townspeople’s daily life on the large surface of a folding screen. His representative work, The Rakuchū Rakugai Folding Screen (Funaki version), is a masterpiece that condenses the streets, festivals, and pleasures of Kyoto into a single screen.

• On six-panel folding-screen pairs, more than 2,700 figures are drawn in
• Yamahoko floats of the Gion Festival, the theater huts of Shijō Kawara, women of the pleasure quarters, brawling samurai, street vendors
• Not simply a picture of famous places, but “people’s daily life” itself is the subject

This anticipated the “genre painting” character of later ukiyo-e. Matabei was not yet called an “ukiyo-e master.” But 20th-century art historians positioned him as its ancestor.

Subjects of Early Genre Painting

Early-17th-century genre painting broadly had three subject groups.

1. Pictures of the Pleasure Quarters (Yūri)

Scenes of the officially licensed pleasure quarters — Shimabara in Kyoto, Shinmachi in Osaka, and later Yoshiwara in Edo. Courtesans, apprentice girls (kamuro), clients, and rooms were depicted. To modern eyes they may look like advertising for a sex-industry establishment, but at the time they were the object of appreciation as “the summit of urban culture.”

2. Pictures of the Theater

Kabuki was still rapidly changing — from women’s kabuki (the lineage of Izumo no Okuni) → young men’s kabuki → men’s kabuki. Many works depict the heat of the theater huts at Shijō Kawara and Sakai-chō.

3. Pictures of Craftsmen and Vendors

As in Rakuchū Rakugai, artisans, itinerant traders, samurai, and monks of the town were drawn side by side, offering a total visual view of the social layers.

Hishikawa Moronobu — the Beauty Looking Back and Mass Production of Sumizuri-e

In the late 17th century, Hishikawa Moronobu (c. 1618-1694) appears in Edo. What made Moronobu decisive in ukiyo-e history was two points.

1. From folding screens to prints — he carried the one-off painted work into a form that could be mass-produced by woodblock printing.
2. The medium of the “illustrated book” and the “single-sheet print” — as illustrated books and stand-alone prints, at prices townspeople could afford.

His representative work Mikaeri Bijin-zu (Beauty Looking Back) is a hand-painted piece, but Moronobu’s printed books were a huge hit in Edo, and he established the notion of “mass production of ukiyo-e.” After this, the image of “ukiyo-e = prints” became strong (hand-painted ukiyo-e continues, but the mainstream shifts to prints).

This period was still one of sumizuri-e (ink prints) — that is, monochrome prints in black. Hand-coloring with vermilion, green, and yellow could be added by hand as hitsusai, but full multicolor printing still had to wait 100 years for the birth of the nishiki-e.

The Term “Ukiyo-e” Settles In

The word “ukiyo-e” settles in from the end of the 17th century to the early 18th century. Before that, various names were used — “genre painting,” “town pictures,” “picture books,” etc. Moronobu’s lineage came to be self-styled and called “pictures that depict the floating world,” and eventually it became established as a genre name crossing schools, techniques, and subjects.

In the same period, in Kyoto, Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750) gained recognition for hand-painted bijin-ga. The Moronobu line in Edo and the Sukenobu line in Kyoto formed the two great sources. This would prepare the birth of the nishiki-e (multicolor prints) by Suzuki Harunobu in the mid-18th century.

From This Article to the Next

Ukiyo-e was still in the act of being born. The subject was set (genre), and the medium was set (print). The great innovation that remained was color. In the next article, we enter the story of 1765, when Suzuki Harunobu realized the nishiki-e — that is, the true birth of ukiyo-e.