During the early modern period in Japan, peace and prosperity allowed elite and popular arts and culture to flourish in Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The historic first showing outside Japan of Ito Jakuchu's thirty-scroll series titled Colorful Realm of Living Beings (ca. 1757-66) in 2012 prompted a reimagining of artists and art making in this context. These essays give attention to Jakuchu's spectacular series as well as to works by a range of contemporary artists. Selected contributions address issues of professional roles, including copying and imitation, display and memorialization, and makers' identities. Some explore the new form of painting, ukiyo-e, in the context of the urban society that provided its subject matter and audiences; others discuss the spectrum of amateur and professional Edo pottery and interrelationships between painting and other media. Together, they reveal the fluidity and dynamism of artists' identities during a time of great significance in the country's history. Published by the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/Distributed by Yale University Press

Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) was one of the most influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e, `pictures of the floating world', in late eighteenth-century Japan, and was widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In this book, Julie Nelson Davis draws on a wide range of period sources, makes a close study of selected print sets and reinterprets Utamaro in the context of his times. Offering a new approach to issues of the status of the artist and the construction of gender, identity, sexuality and celebrity in the Edo period, and now in an updated edition containing a new preface and many new images, this book is a significant contribution to the field, and will be a key work for readers interested in Japanese arts and cultures.