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context: painting > prints > origins
Ukiyo-e
Vast wealth sloshing around, leisure time like never before, new moneyed classes. The pleasure quarters of cities, especially Edo's Yoshiwara, became bigger and richer and more important. People wanted new pleasures, and the transient areas of fashion and hedonistic living were at the forefront. Artists catered for that transient, floating world, ukiyo in Japanese, with images of city life, of glamorous courtesans, of the populist theatre, of sex.
The term ukiyo-e, coined by the writer Asai Ryoi in 1661, has become inseparably tied to print-making; we all know its denotative meaning is describing subject matter; but other critics will claim it as an art style. This section is about prints, and while many are of the floating world, this hardly applies to a mountain, of course. The style of flowing outline art established by Moronobu and other artists seems to me to be more characteristic of this era of printmaking than any notion of subject matter, but what we are really talking about is a conjunction of artistic style, subject matter and means of production, all coming together to produce an era of art like none other.