Woodblock Print

Technique

The mokuhanga process begins with an artist's drawing transferred onto thin paper and pasted face-down onto a block of close-grained wood, traditionally cherry, which the carver then cuts away around the drawn lines to leave the design in relief. For multicolour prints, a separate block is carved for each colour, and carvers cut precise registration notches called kentō into every block so that successive colour impressions align exactly on the same sheet of paper. Ink or pigment is brushed onto the raised surface of each block, and the dampened paper is pressed onto it by hand using a round, cord-wrapped pad called a baren, rather than a mechanical press, allowing the printer to control pressure and achieve subtle tonal gradations (bokashi) unattainable with oil-based Western printing inks. Because the water-based pigments are transparent, printers can layer colours to build depth and can burnish selectively to vary saturation across a single block impression. The process demands extraordinary division of labour and technical precision, since a single misregistered block can ruin an entire multicolour edition, and mastery of carving fine hairline detail is a distinct skill separate from the original design.

History

Woodblock printing originated in China during the Tang dynasty and was introduced to Japan in the late 700s CE, with the earliest documented Japanese printed works dating to 764, when Empress Kōken commissioned one million printed Buddhist charms (the Hyakumantō Darani). Through the medieval period the technique remained largely confined to Buddhist temples for reproducing sutras, and it was not until the early Edo period, with the Saga Books produced by Honami Kōetsu and Suminokura Soan in the early 1600s, that woodblock printing began to serve wider literary and artistic purposes. Commercial ukiyo-e prints depicting courtesans and actors emerged as an affordable popular art form in the later seventeenth century, initially in monochrome (sumizuri-e), then with hand-applied or limited colour; the pivotal technical breakthrough came in 1765 when Suzuki Harunobu introduced full-colour nishiki-e ("brocade pictures") printing using multiple registered blocks. The genre reached its artistic peak in the early to mid-nineteenth century with Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (including The Great Wave off Kanagawa) and Utagawa Hiroshige's landscape series, before declining commercially with the rise of photography and Western influence after Japan's opening in the 1850s–60s. Exported ukiyo-e prints subsequently had an outsized impact on European art, inspiring Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas, and the tradition was revived in the early twentieth century through the shin-hanga and sōsaku-hanga movements.