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History - Part One
Paintings
Contemporary Netsuke
History - Part 3
The Artists
Publications and Sales
A History of Edo Period Painting - Part Two
The Merchants
Joe D Price
WITHIN THE COCOON-LIKE ISOLATION OF
this tiny island society, the artist, freed from the dictates of
outside influence, reached back to a time prior to these restrictions and
resumed that art totally peculiar to himself.
He copied little from the outside world, for it barely existed for him. What he developed was an art form unique in both content and style. An art form purely and solely Japanese.
This was a time when inventive artisans began emerging
from other than official schools, being trained instead in the shops of
fan makers, weavers, dyers, and other trades being supported by the most
unlikely class of all, the merchants. 
Merchants. The lowest of low
in Japanese society. Base. Cultureless. Driven solely by the misdeed of
profit, they produced no useful product. Surely, one so low as to be forbidden
the use of a last name was well beneath the proud warriors' notice. The
predictable outcome? While the Samurai retained his honor and his precious
titles, it was the townspeople who soon had most of the wealth.
More and more, the merchant, the commoner, demanded an
art of his own. With his newfound wealth he could insist on an art that
he could understand and appreciate - an art for the
unsophisticated, common man.
What emerged was a style that reflected their new mood of affluence, the
mood of the theater, the mood of the gay quarter, the Yoshiwara. An art
that was simply and purely decorative, for no other cause than to delight
the eye.
Although this new freedom of expression in the art world delighted the merchant-sponsors no end, it was most certainly not an art for the Royal Court. Sealed off from the rest of the country, inbreeding and dabbling in poetry, they knew little of what was going on. Nor would this art receive a nod of approval from the clergy who clung to traditional art styles designed for piety and retribution.
That this art was until recently held in low esteem by the Japanese themselves is not too difficult to understand. After all, in the rigid society of the time, this art was not only commissioned by patrons from the very bottom of the social structure, it was created by artists whose minds were not necessarily pure; modeled by subjects dominated by the red light houses of the Yoshiwara.
