Images to read, play and buy

Nishiki-e: building colour one impression at a time

Nishiki-e are Japanese multicolour woodblock prints. Separate printed impressions combine on one sheet, allowing a design to be reproduced without painting every copy by hand.

Kibyōshi: pictures and writing in Edo fiction

Kibyōshi brought pictures, writing and topical humour together in late eighteenth-century Edo fiction. Reading two facing pages means following the words around the figures as well as the actions they depict.

E-sugoroku: reading a route across a printed world

Hokusai: a career beyond the Great Wave

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was an Edo-period ukiyo-e artist whose work included actor prints, book illustrations, drawing manuals, landscapes and paintings. Names such as Shunro, Sori and Iitsu belong to different parts of this one artist’s career.

Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji: a series of 46 designs

Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is a colour woodblock-print series published in the early 1830s. Ten designs were added to the original 36. Each design could then be printed in more than one surviving impression.

The Great Wave: one design, many impressions

The Great Wave: The Met’s impression JP1847

A curling wave towers over long boats, with Mount Fuji small in the distance. Hokusai’s colour woodblock design survives in multiple impressions; here the focus is the sheet numbered JP1847 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.