Ukiyo-e flourished mainly during which period of Japanese history?

Ukiyo-e flourished mainly during Japan’s Edo period, from 1603 to 1867.

The genre developed alongside the growth of Edo, the city now known as Tokyo, after Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Tokugawa shogunate there in 1603. A prosperous urban culture of merchants, theatergoers, courtesans, and artisans created a large audience for affordable paintings and woodblock prints. Ukiyo-e—“pictures of the floating world”—often depicted kabuki actors, beautiful women, sumo wrestlers, popular stories, and pleasure districts.

Its techniques and subjects evolved throughout the period. Multicolor nishiki-e prints became common in the 1760s, while the late eighteenth century brought a peak in portraits of beauties and actors. In the nineteenth century, Hokusai and Hiroshige helped make landscape one of ukiyo-e’s defining genres.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the Edo period. Ukiyo-e continued afterward, but modernization, imported printing technology, changing tastes, and new photographic methods weakened the traditional commercial print system. Thus, the Meiji period is a later chapter, not ukiyo-e’s main flourishing era.