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Art of the Edo Period (1615–1868)
Tawaraya Sotatsu and Hon'ami Koetsu: Poem page mounted as a hanging scroll Stationery box [Japan] The Battles of Hogen and Heiji [Japanese] Goto Teijo: Koto Surcoat (jimbaori) [Japan] Kano Tan'yu: The Sixth Patriarch of Zen at the Moment of Enlightenment Inro with decoration of Portuguese figures [Japan] Ogata Korin: Eight-Planked Bridge (Yatsuhashi) Nagasawa Rosetsu: Landscape and Chinese Figures
Noh robe (nuihaku) [Japanese] Toshusai Sharaku: Otani Oniji II


In the harshly controlled feudal society governed for over 250 years by the descendants of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), creativity came not from its leaders, a conservative military class, but from the two lower classes in the Confucian social hierarchy, the artisans and merchants. Although officially denigrated, they were free to reap the economic and social benefits of this prosperous age. The tea ceremony, which had been adopted by every class during the Momoyama period, provided the medium in which literary and artistic traditions of the past were assimilated and transformed by highly cultivated men of both the bourgeoisie and the court. By the late 1630s, contact with the outside world was cut off through official prohibition of foreigners. In Japan's self-imposed isolation, traditions of the past were revived and refined, and ultimately parodied and transformed in the flourishing urban societies of Kyoto and Edo. Restricted trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants was permitted in Nagasaki, and it spurred development of Japanese porcelain and provided an opening for Ming literati culture to filter into artistic circles of Kyoto and, later, Edo.

By the end of the seventeenth century, three distinct modes of creative expression flourished. The renaissance of Heian culture accomplished by aristocrats and cultivated Kyoto townsmen was perpetuated in the painting and crafts of the school that later came to be called Rinpa. In urban Edo, which assumed a distinctive character with its revival after a devastating fire in 1657, a witty, irreverent expression surfaced in the literary and visual arts, giving rise to the kabuki theater and the well-known woodblock prints of the "floating world," or ukiyo-e. In the eighteenth century, a Japanese response to the few threads of Chinese literati culture, introduced by Ming Chinese monks at Manpuku-ji south of Kyoto, resulted in a new style known as bunjin-ga ("literati painting"), or nanga ("painting of the southern school") after the Ming term for literati painting. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these various styles were embraced by Japanese artists and artisans as distinct but nonexclusive and complementary modes of expression.


Asia, Japan, Trade and Travel (1600-1800 A.D.), Print, Woodcut, Europe, Furniture, Screen, Tawaraya Sotatsu (Japanese, active early 17th century), Nagasawa Rosetsu (Japanese, 1754-1799), Ogata Korin (Japanese, 1658-1716), Toshusai Sharaku (Japanese, active 1794-95), Hon'ami Koetsu (Japanese, 1558-1637), Literature and Literary Connections, Scholar, Painting, Ink on Paper, East Asia, Japan, Theater, Lacquer, Landscape, Landscape, East Asia, Japan, Textile, Silk, East Asia, Embroidery, East Asia

Department of Asian Art

The Kano School of Painting, Heian Period, Ming Dynasty, Momoyama Period, Chosôn Punch'ông Ware: Between Celadon and Porcelain, The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911): Painting, Rinpa Painting Style, Woodblock Prints in the Ukiyo-e Style, Yamato-e Painting, Samurai, Europe and the Age of Exploration, Japonisme , In Pursuit of White: Porcelain in the Chosôn Dynasty, 1392-1910, Lacquerware of East Asia, Seasonal Imagery in Japanese Art, Art of the Pleasure Quarters and the Ukiyo-e Style, Shoguns and Art, Painting Formats in East Asian Art, Abridged List of Rulers: Japan, Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art,

China, 1600-1800 A.D., Japan, 1600-1800 A.D., Korea, 1600-1800 A.D.,

East Asia, 1600-1800 A.D.