Landscape and Legend

Heroes, Ghosts and the West

Late Edo, Meiji, and prints abroad, 1827–1927

In the 1800s battle scenes, ghosts and foreign newcomers grew into major subjects, even as censors banned actor prints for several years. Abroad, Western painters and printmakers borrowed the prints' ways of composing, and by the 1920s Yoshida Hiroshi had carried the woodblock into modern times.

• Heroes and ghosts as censorship tightened
• Foreign trade and the Western newcomers
• Western borrowings and a modern Japanese revival

Works in this part

• Hu Sanniang, from One Hundred and Eight Heroes of the Popular Water Margin
• Ghosts of the Taira at Daimotsu Bay
• Popular Ōtsu-e Phenomenon
• Artisans, from An Up-to-Date Parody of the Four Classes
• An American Mercantile Building in Yokohama
• Moon over Daimotsu Bay: Benkei, from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon
• Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen
• The Letter
• Boats at Rest
• Evening on the Chikugo River

Image: The Met Open Access · Public domain (Met Open Access)