Hishikawa Moronobu. Hishikawa Moronobu was a Japanese artist known for popularizing the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock prints and paintings in the late 17th century.
Moronobu was the son of a well-respected dyer and a gold and silver-thread brocade artisan in the village of Hodamura, Awa Province, near Edo Bay in present-day Kyonan, Chiba Prefecture. After moving to Edo, Moronobu, who had learned his father's craft, studied both Tosa and Kano-style painting.
He thus had a solid grounding in both decorative crafts and academic painting, which served him well when he then turned to ukiyo-e, which he studied with his mentor, the Kanbun Master. His first known signed and dated works were book illustrations from 1672, although earlier works may yet surface.
By the mid-1670s Moronobu had already become the most important ukiyo-e printmaker, a position he maintained until his death. He produced more than 100 illustrated books, perhaps as many as 150, though it is difficult to attribute to him many unsigned examples.
Very few of Moronobu's single-sheet prints have survived, and most, if not all, are unsigned. Among these single sheets are erotic album prints. Moronobu was not the founder of ukiyo-e, as some early scholars surmised. Instead, he made an assimilation of inchoate ukiyo-e designs by previous artists, a consolidation of genre and early ukiyo-e painting and prints. It was Moronobu who created the fi
Moronobu was the son of a well-respected dyer and a gold and silver-thread brocade artisan in the village of Hodamura, Awa Province, near Edo Bay in present-day Kyonan, Chiba Prefecture. After moving to Edo, Moronobu, who had learned his father's craft, studied both Tosa and Kano-style painting.
He thus had a solid grounding in both decorative crafts and academic painting, which served him well when he then turned to ukiyo-e, which he studied with his mentor, the Kanbun Master. His first known signed and dated works were book illustrations from 1672, although earlier works may yet surface.
By the mid-1670s Moronobu had already become the most important ukiyo-e printmaker, a position he maintained until his death. He produced more than 100 illustrated books, perhaps as many as 150, though it is difficult to attribute to him many unsigned examples.
Very few of Moronobu's single-sheet prints have survived, and most, if not all, are unsigned. Among these single sheets are erotic album prints. Moronobu was not the founder of ukiyo-e, as some early scholars surmised. Instead, he made an assimilation of inchoate ukiyo-e designs by previous artists, a consolidation of genre and early ukiyo-e painting and prints. It was Moronobu who created the fi
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