Exhibition

Masters of Japanese Prints: Life in the City

12 Jan 2019 – 12 May 2019

Event times

Tue-Sun: 10am-5pm. Closed Mondays except Bank Holidays and Mondays during Bristol school holidays.

Cost of entry

Free

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Featuring original woodblock prints from Bristol's collection, this exhibition explores the sophisticated urban culture of Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries, from fashion and day trips to geisha and the kabuki theatre.

About

This is the second exhibition in Bristol's Masters of Japanese Prints series.

By the 18th century, Japan’s capital, Edo (today’s Tokyo), was the largest city in the world with over a million inhabitants. Many of its merchants and craftspeople were comfortably off and they could afford fine fashion and trips to tea houses, restaurants and the kabuki theatre. The very wealthiest men were able to visit elegant geisha (professional entertainers) and courtesans (high class prostitutes) in the city’s pleasure quarters.

These city entertainments fuelled the market for woodblock prints. Theatre fans were eager to buy programmes for the season ahead and likenesses of their favourite actors. Visitors to the city might take home souvenirs of key landmarks such as bridges, rivers and temples or images of famous beauties, for the price of a bowl of noodles.

This exhibition will explore how artists and craftspeople developed fine multi-colour prints with increasingly sophisticated effects to respond to this demand whilst abiding by regulations laid down by the Shogunate, Japan’s military dictatorship.

The rare and colourful prints in our collection, specially conserved and mounted for the exhibition, allow glimpses into Japanese urban life, both elegant and earthy, over 250 years ago.

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has a collection of some 500 ‘floating world pictures’ (ukiyo-e) which celebrate the pleasures of life in Japan. The collection ranks in the top five regional UK collections.

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