ARH 488/588 Japanese Prints

Fall 2011

This page is designed to help you in locating authoritative sources for research on the Japanese woodblock print form known as Ukiyo-e, literally, pictures of the floating world.

For more in depth research assistance, please contact Art Librarian, Cara List in the Architecture and Allied Arts Library at clist@uoregon.edu, or 541-346-2200.

Start your research:

When starting research on a topic, it is often useful to get an overview of your topic in a concise form. Encyclopedias and other reference sources may help to provide this quick overview. The are also useful for fleshing out peripheral movements, influences etc when you are starting your research.

Grove Dictionary of Art and Oxford Art Online (including the Oxford Companion to Western Literature, the Dictionary of Aesthetics and the Consise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms). The Grove Dictionary of Art doesn't make it easy to locate information on ukiyo-e. A simple search on this term provides a number of hits, none of them direct. The best way to locate a substantial overview is to search "Japan". Within the larger article on Japan, there is a section on ukiyo-e under painting (§ VI.4. (iv)(b)), and the entire section on prints and books (§ IX) is worth reviewing. Individual artists' names are hyperlinks to additional articles. Notably there is also an excellent article on Japonisme, the influence of Japanese art on that of Europe and the west.

Lane, Richard. Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print: Including an Illustrated Dictionary of Ukiyo-e. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978. A&AA Ref NE1321.8 .L36 1978 The narrative portion of this resource provides a much more detailed overview of the history and development of ukiyo-e from the painters of the Kana school to the opening of Japan and neo ukiyo-e. However, what makes this resource of special value is the illustrated dictionary with it's many features including lists of actor's crests (to help in identifying the Kabuki actors depicted in prints), publishers' seals, information on the Japanese calendar, maps showing various provinces and other geographic information, and an index to alternate names for Ukiyo-e artists.

Newland, Amy Reigle, ed. The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock Prints. Amsterdam: Hotei Publishers, 2005. A&AA Ref NE1310 .H68 2005 In the preface to this two volume work, Richard Lane's Images from the Floating World is acknowledged as the original source for an organized overview of Ukiyo-e. The Hotei Encyclopedia offers the addition of the significant research that has transpired in the intervening thirty years. Edited by Amy Reigel Newland, essays by numerous expert authors provide a broader historical overview beginning in 1603 and continuing through to 1926 Like Lane, Newland is split into two parts. Volume one contains the historically organized essays as well as several chapters on publishing, materials and techniques, and collecting. Volume 2, includes an index of artists, lineage charts, a number of highly useful historical tables, maps, and indexes of seals and signatures.

A Dictionary of Japanese Art Terms, Bilingual[Japanese & English]. Tokyo: Tokyo Bijutsu, 1990. A&AA Ref N7350 .W23 1990 This source may be useful when reading material that is dense with transliterated vernacular art terms. It uses the revised Hepburn system, the most common of methods for transliterating Japanese characters into the Roman alphabet. You may wish to use the index to terms in the back of the book as the order of the alphabet is different than it is in English.

Find journal articles:

This box is searching the following databases, but you can search them one at a time too. You can also find other worthwhile databases on the OneSearch advanced page.

Art Full Text provides access to the content of leading art and design journals covering all aspects of art, art history and theory, as well as other related areas including some performance, theater and film.

Bibliography of Asian Studies
This database is the primary bibliography for Asian Studies information sources in Western languages. Starting in 1971 it contains journal articles, essays, conference proceedings and books. For earlier citations, consult the Cumulative Bibliography of Asian Studies, 1941-1965 in Knight Library Z3001.C94.

Web of Knowledge (Arts and Humanities Citation Index) Web of Knowledge is a reverse citation index, meaning that if you locate an article citation in this database you can track citations both backwards and forwards.

JSTOR is an online archive of over 400 academic journals. All articles in JSTOR are peer reviewed.

You may also want to try:
Google Scholar Here you can find articles that are archived in free open access online archives.

Get more help:
Looking for Articles in Journals and Magazines presents strategies for using journal indexes and databases.

Scholarly vs. Popular provides you with clues about how to distinguish the difference between scholarly (aka peer-reviewed or refereed) and popular journal articles.

Find books:

UO WorldCat, also available on the catalog tab on the UO Libraries' homepage, locates books, journals, videos and other library materials at the UO, Summit libraries and in libraries around the world. Materials owned by the UO are listed first on the results list, followed by Summit and then by libraries elsewhere. To change the order of your results to the most relevant, use the box at the top right side of the results list.

UO Libraries You may wish to use the local catalog to locate materials in the UO Libraries' Special collections or in the A&AA Library's Secure Collection, which houses rare art and architecture materials.

Get more help:
For more information about the UO Library Catalog, the Summit catalog and UO WorldCat see the Books and More page.

Borrowing materials from other libraries: Interlibrary loans(ILL) and Summit borrowing provides you with more information about borrowing books and other library materials from libraries in the Summit consortium and beyond. You may also find ILL forms for books and journals on this page. Use these forms when you have a citation from a bibliography or other information source.

Find images

ARTstor The largest image database of art works including a massive number of Japanese woodblock prints

CAMIO: Catalog of Art Museum Images Online Another major art image database. There is some duplication between ARTstor and Camio, but you may also find unique images.

Art and Architecture Images> This image database is created here in the A&AA Library in the Visual Resources Collection. You will find a selection Ukiyo-e images that have been added in support of this class.

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of ArtThe JSMA online collection represents a portion of their complete holdings. Use the advanced search to specify culture=Japanese and object type=print to browse the 1007 images of Japanese prints, or search for a specific artist or title.

Other resources

A Guide to the Ukiyo-e Sites of the InternetThis list of internet sites may be useful, but remember that each of the sites listed should be considered individually for their authority and/or credibility.

Japanese Art Collections at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art.

The Art of Asia: Ukiyo-e at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Ukiyo-e in Wikipedia. Actually, Wikipedia has a lower error rate than the Encyclopedia Britanica for it's science articles, so you may wish to take a look at some of the added resources that are linked from their main article on Ukiyo-e. The list of "important artists" and "see alsos" lead to other Wikipedia articles which may have decent lists of Further Reading and External Links. Make sure to check to see whether Wikipedia's editors have added any notes about the presence or veracity of the articles references, and as always double check any information you find here with more scholarly sources.

Maintained by: Cara List, clist@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 09/28/2011