''Nikuhitsu-ga'' (肉筆画) is a form of

Japanese painting is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese visual arts, encompassing a wide variety of genres and styles. As with the history of Japanese arts in general, the long history of Japanese painting exhibits synthesis and competitio ...

in the ''

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

'' art style. The

woodblock prints Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is create ...

of this genre have become so famous in the West as to become almost synonymous with the term "ukiyo-e", but most ''ukiyo-e'' artists were painters as well as printmakers, with much the same style and subjects. Some turned to painting at the end of a career in prints, while some, like

Miyagawa Chōshun Miyagawa Chōshun ( ja, 宮川長春; 1683 – 18 December 1753) was a Japanese painter in the ukiyo-e style. Founder of the Miyagawa school, he and his pupils are among the few ukiyo-e artists to have never created woodblock prints. H ...

and a number of the artists of the Kaigetsudō school, never made prints and only worked in paintings. Though advances in printing technology advanced over the course of the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

(1603–1868), allowing for the production of more and more elaborate and colorful prints, the medium of painting always allowed a greater degree of freedom to the artist, and involved a much larger product in any case; the paintings of many ''ukiyo-e'' artists survive today and are known for their bright colors, attention to detail, and bold brush strokes.

References

JAANUS
Ukiyo-e techniques Japanese painting {{art-movement-stub