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context: painting > prints > artists
Okumura Masanobu, 1686-1764
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a Masanobu uki-e, or perspective picture |
You could tell the story of the early (usually called primitive, but I'll dodge that term here) days of Edo printmaking entirely through Masanobu. He started with the monochrome prints, was among the first artists to get into two-colour prints, and is credited with inventing lacquer prints (which never became big). But I've chosen to highlight here his playing with linear perspective, largely introduced from Europe, and seen as a cute novelty in Japan, a handy tool and nice idea, but to be taken about as seriously as 3-D in comic books - a fun gimmick for an enterprising salesman (Masanobu is unusual among leading print artists in also publishing and selling the work). Frankly, he didn't know how to do it - the above shows that he got the hang of single-point perspective late on, but his earlier uki-e, perspective prints, have lots of lines many of which make no sense at all.