Ukiyo-e — literally "pictures of the floating world," the floating world being the pleasure districts, kabuki theaters, and fashionable urban culture of Edo period Japan — was the dominant popular art form of Japan from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, produced primarily as woodblock prints in large editions affordable to the merchant and artisan classes of a rapidly urbanizing society, and it would prove to be, through its enormous influence on French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, one of the most consequential artistic traditions in the history of world art. The subjects of ukiyo-e were drawn from the vivid, transient spectacles of city life — beautiful courtesans rendered with an attention to the nuances of fashion and personal elegance that amounts to a form of social portraiture; kabuki actors frozen at moments of peak dramatic intensity, their exaggerated makeup and expressions captured in the dynamic close-up format of yakusha-e; landscapes of celebrated sites rendered with compositional innovations — radical cropping, flattened perspective, bold color contrasts, and an acute sensitivity to weather and atmospheric effect — that European artists would find revelatory when Japanese prints began flooding Western markets after 1854. The woodblock printing process that produced ukiyo-e was itself a remarkable technical achievement, requiring the collaboration of designer, carver, and printer to achieve the precise color registration and tonal gradation that the finest prints display, and masters of the form — Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Sharaku — pushed the technical possibilities of the medium to their absolute limits, producing in works like Hokusai's Great Wave and Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge images whose compositional boldness and emotional directness have never been surpassed in the history of printmaking.