Haverford College

The works in the Arnold Satterthwait collection belong to an artistic tradition known as “images of the floating world” (ukiyo-e 浮世絵), the visual and material manifestation of a unique culture that emerged and flourished in Edo period Japan (1605-1868). To live in this floating world was to detach oneself from the monotony and frustrations of the quotidian and surrender to the ephemeral pleasures of the here-and-now. The floating world culture gave rise to and found its most vivid expression in the artistic genre of ukiyo-e. Prints, at the heart of a mass-produced commercial enterprise, were readily available to the public through a citywide distribution system of publishing houses and print shops. Ukiyo-e offered a point of access, a way of seeing inside the floating world. However, the floating world as it existed within the pictorial space of woodblock prints extended far beyond the space and time of the urban locales that gave birth to it.