Page 482 - The Secret Museum

Ukiyo-e artists were the Andy Warhols of Japanese art. They mass-marketed high

art: suddenly, from about 1680 on, almost anyone in Japan who wanted to own a
piece of art could afford it. Whereas paintings on silk were very expensive, the
ukiyo-e images were printed on paper and could be created cheaply. To make a print,
an artist would design an image, then give it to a hikkū, or workshop assistant, who
would make a tracing. A craftsman glued that on to a block of wood and cut the image
into it. The block was inked and printed so as to make hundreds or thousands of

copies.
Every print in the collection was made like this, by hand, by men sitting on the

floor at low tables in the back rooms of Edo. You may well have done the same thing
yourself: taken a stamp, pressed it on to an inkpad and pressed out the image on the
stamp on paper.

One of the top artists who created prints in this way was Hiroshige. The first print
the Spauldings bought for their nascent collection was one of his. Born the son of a
fire-warden in Edo in 1797, Hiroshige became a prolific artist and designed
thousands of compositions for ukiyo-e woodcuts. The most popular were reprinted
many thousands of times.

Sarah showed me some scenes from the work that sealed his reputation as a

master, his 1833–34 Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, depicting stations
along the 500 kilometres highway along the Pacific coast that linked Edo with the
imperial city of Kyoto. One scene from Kanbara station called Night Snow

shows three men walking outside at night, in
the snow, wearing snow clogs or barefoot. They are bent over, to shield themselves
from the bitter wind. I felt freezing just looking at them.

Another print I liked was The Koto Player by Suzuki Harunobu

(1725–70), the first Japanese artist to design commercial prints using the Chinese
method of printing with five colours. It shows a Japanese lady leaning to one side
and playing a stringed instrument called a koto. Above her are built-in cabinets
painted with purple iris. Behind her is a small stove with a kettle for tea on top of it.
This beautiful woman is very accomplished. She reads and writes, she arranges
flowers, can perform the Japanese tea ceremony, she lights incense and knows how

to play the koto.
We also looked at a set of three prints that make up one design called A

Pilgrimage to Enoshima , designed in about 1789 by Torii Kiyonaga. It
shows a group of women resting on the shore opposite the island which contains the
sacred shrine of Enoshima. Throngs of people still visit the island today to see the
shrine and the pretty island.

One Western artist who would have been in heaven leafing through the Spaulding
collection was Vincent van Gogh. He first bought some Japanese prints from the
docks in Antwerp and delighted in them from then on until his death, copying them