Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection

Tuhinga 30: 56-81

ABSTRACT: This article examines Edo period (1603–1868) Japanese artworks acquired by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from the Ian and Mary Heriot collection in 2016. It situates its commentary on these works of art in the context of the emergence of a new, affluent, educated middle class and a new ‘floating world’ sensibility that favoured the enjoyment of literature, visual and decorative arts, kabuki theatre and the teahouses, restaurants and pleasures of the Yoshiwara licensed brothel district of Edo, the city we know today as Tokyo. It constructs a historical narrative for the broader development of ukiyo-e ‘floating world pictures’ from the crystallisation of the polychrome nishiki-e ‘brocade picture’ woodblock print, through to the theatricality of later Utagawa school kabuki prints. Within this narrative, it also acknowledges the emergence of specialist pictorial categories of bijin-ga pictures of beautiful women, manga collections of informal drawings, kabuki theatre themes and actor prints, deluxe limited-edition surimono prints, allusive genre scenes and poetic mitate-e ‘parody pictures’. This account also embraces period works outside the normal Edo focus of ukiyo-e, works from Ōsaka and Yokohama, and monochrome compositions from the Kanō school painters. Finally, these narratives situate the diversity of the Heriots’ Edo-period works against the broad purvey of recurrent threads of interest in collecting Japanese art through several generations in New Zealand.

KEYWORDS: Edo, ukiyo-e, woodblock printing, ‘floating world’, chōnin, kabuki, Yamato-e, Ōsaka-e, Kanō school, Heriot collection, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa