Wikipedia:Peer review/Ukiyo-e/archive1

Ukiyo-e
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This is an article about the genre of Japanese prints and paintings. I'm hoping to nominate this article as a Featured Article candidate sometime this year, and would like to get some more eyes on it. Any help or feedback would be appreciated—in particular, I'd like some feedback on the choice of images (there are at least hundreds of thousands to choose from), and my admittedly poor description of ukiyo-e's relation to traditional Japanese aesthetics. The text will appear to be a mix of American and British spellings—that's because I've been obnoxious enough to poison it with Canadian spelling.

Thanks, Curly Turkey (gobble) 23:17, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Pretty good, & very close to, if not at, FA standard. I have only skimmed through so far. The images chosen for the Western art influenced are all landscapes, and very direct borrowings, and the text does not explain how the borrowing worked in artistic terms. [This short book "The_Great_Wave_The_Influence_of_Japanese_Woodcuts_on_French_Prints" from the MMA is fully available online as a PDF, and good on that, though indeed only concerned with French Prints (Cassatt counting as French) by painters - Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Bonnard, Vuillard, T-L & Gauguin. Even the chronology at the beginning gives useful material.

Not much on how they were (as opposed to are now) collected and displayed, and how expensive they were, and profitable for the artists. Or did the publishers make all the money? Wasn't there a big slump in the ukiyo-e market in the later 19th century? I've read of early examples reaching the West used as packing material. I've added two basic links that seemed to be missing - Japonism/e and Woodblock printing in Japan, both to large articles that one would have thought pretty central to the subject. Please check the Japanese art category tree for others. Probably "ukiyo-e's relation to traditional Japanese aesthetics" is not too well covered, nor what was very traditional subject matter from painting (bird and flower) and what fairly new (actors?). Did artists come to be trained just for prints, or did they continue to have a training in painting?

The style & expression could be improved in places: "Degas, Monet,[93] Mary Cassatt, and Toulouse-Lautrec were amongst the artists taken in by Japonism .... " (my bold) is ambiguous!

I'll try to read through fully & comment again. Johnbod (talk) 14:32, 26 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for taking a look at this.
 * Thanks for the link to The Great Wave The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints—I've downloaded it and will do what I can with it.
 * I've reworded "taken in" to "associated with".
 * I preferred "Japonism" to "Japonisme" because I have a thing about keeping English articles English—there's a note: "Burty coined the term le Japonisme in French in 1872".
 * Woodblock printing in Japan was linked as a article in the "Print production" section
 * The "packing material" meme seems to get around, but I have yet to come across it in a book that's actually about ukiyo-e. Personally, I doubt it.
 * Here it is, in The Great Wave—apparently Hokusai's Manga had indeed been used as packing material by Félix Bracquemond's printer, and Monet may have found some prints later in Holland that were used as "wrapping paper". The prints had already been circulating for at least a half-century before then in Europe (including Paris), so while the story's "true", it's not an origin story.  I'm not sure if I should include these anecdotes, or leave them to the Japonism article. Curly Turkey (gobble) 00:47, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Costs would have been different throughout the 200-year period—economic conditions changed, as did printing practices: almost exclusively monochrome prints in the first century or so, to the nishiki-e prints of the latter; different print sizes; different techniques (mica, embossing, burnishing, type of wood carved (cherry wood apparently came later), etc) ... and then when you mix in things like inflation and the constantly changing economic conditions, I think a "typical" price (or price range) would be, at the very least, a moving target.
 * I haven't come across a lot on how profitable they were for the artists—apparently they worked on commission (I'll have to check again). Hiroshige made "about twice the wages of a day labourer", but apparently made less than other popular artists (poor negotiating skills?)
 * In the "style" section it's briefly mentioned that "Many ukiyo-e artists received training from teachers of the Kanō and other painterly schools." Not all artists painted, but it appears most of them did (including later ones like Hokusai and Hiroshige).

———Curly Turkey (gobble) 00:01, 27 February 2014 (UTC)