I Do Like Traditional Japanese Prints,

and here is a new reprint of them,

all images © Utagawa Hiroshige, courtesy of Taschen, the genre of Japanese art called ukiyo-e—translating to “pictures of the floating world”—centred on colourful depictions of landscapes, performers and sumo wrestlers, and scenes from folklore and history in vivid woodblock prints, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858),

as it happens we have featured his work on our blog many times before,

his final project, an ambitious collection of 120 woodblock illustrations, became known as One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and depicts what is now Tokyo throughout the seasons,

and now a new reprint from Taschen pairs each of the artist’s remarkable prints with text by authors Lorenz Bichler and Melanie Trede, celebrating the scenery, the city’s history, and Hiroshige’s contribution to ukiyo-e,

the text chronicles the influence of Japonisme on European decorative arts and painters like Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and James McNeill Whistler,

the new edition is presented in a case and bound in a traditional Japanese style known as stab binding in which a series of holes are punched in the cover and the spine is elegantly bound with string,

scheduled for release next month, you can pre-order One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Complete Plates on Taschen’s website, and at £60.00 not exactly expensive for a work like this.