Printmaking provided the medium of expression for these renegade cultures. Artists like Kitagawa Utamaro and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec elevated prints from commercial to fine art, while flouting tradition in style and subject matter. They produced scenes of ordinary people partaking in everyday pleasures...
back to my earlier remarks on the formats of prints of actors in this period, more specifically the development of an increasing number of diptych and triptych compositions, these are quite different from what we saw with the Katsukawa artists in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Rat...
Bunsei was a Zen Buddhist artist whose seal appears on five remarkable paintings, strong evidence that he painted them. Two of the paintings are official portraits of monks associated with the Daitoku Temple in Kyōto. They were painted about 1450 and ar
Chinese. Experiments in realism, significantly influenced by exposure to Western models, produced major new painting lineages. Particularly distinctive of the period was the increase in the number of important individualist artists and of artists whoseeclectictraining could meet the demands of varied ...
The everyday world of human endeavour has been carefully observed by Japanese artists. For example, the human figure in a multiplicity of mundane poses was memorably recorded by the print artist Hokusai (1760–1849). The quirky and humorous seldom eluded the view of the many anonymous creators...