Japanese Woodblock Print Search

“Evening Cool on Sumida” by Kobayashi Eijiro; “Colonel Sato, Sino-Japanese War” by Taguchi Beisaku; “Arakawa River in May Rain” by Kawase Hasui

Behold the “Japanese Woodblock Print Search”, which does precisely what the name suggests: Type in a search string, and it’ll look through 223,891 prints to find ones that match.

I searched for “river” and got those three lovely prints you see above!

The project has been run since 2012 by the coder and woodblock-enthusiastic John Resig (also the creator of Jquery). As Jessica Stewart writes on MyModernMet, the search engine…

… collates collections from 24 museums, libraries, auction houses, and art dealers around the world. By uniting the individual collections, there are several interesting features that make Ukiyo-e.org a top destination for anyone interested in Japanese printmaking. Aside from the ability to search by institution, artist, and time period, you can also upload an image to see if there are any similar prints in the database. And, once you click on an entry, similar prints in the archive also appear, allowing you to click through and see the differences in color and quality.

BTW, quite a lot of those prints are in the public domain.

via: LF Linkfest