Shunga, Japanese erotic art

[tuskerwilliams]

This is a thread for Japanese erotic and pornographic art, in any medium, prints, paintings or whatever. Please do not include works by more than a single artist in one post (or a single anonymous set, or thematically related material, or related material from a single era). That will make it easier to find things and avoid reduplications. This is a particularly interesting artistic tradition because what we would class as pornography was accepted subject matter in ukiyoe, rather than something furtive or clandestine.

To start off, a quite well known set of good quality, the 'Haikai Book of the Cuckoo' by Katsukawa Shunsho, dated to 1788. (The scans in imagevenue should increase to a larger size if you click on them there; they come from a set in the British Museum.)

[tuskerwilliams]

Some close-ups of genitalia and sexual activity, by (or attributed to) Eisai Keisen (1790-1848):

[tuskerwilliams]

An unpretentious pair of ink and watercolour paintings, presumably of quite late origin. One is an explicit shunga picture while the second (the better of the two in my view)) would be classed as abuna-e because it is suggestive rather than explicit. The latter term suggests that it is a dangerous, or we might say, risqué image. I have added an example of an abuna-e woodcut print.



A larger image of the explicit one:

[tuskerwilliams]

This would be another example of abuna-e, as a slightly risqué picture, if it were not that the reflection in the mirror behind shows explicitly what is going on under the covers:

[tuskerwilliams]

A scroll painting by a certain Kakejiku, 1800:

[tuskerwilliams]

Tomioka Eisen (1864-1905), from the series 'Poetic Intercourse':

[tuskerwilliams]

Kitagawa Utamaro, prints from the Laughing Drinker, first part:

[tuskerwilliams]

The vaginal orgasm imagined:

[tuskerwilliams]

Variations on the same theme, the first anonymous the second by Tomioka Eisen, c. 1890. There must have been very little privacy in old Japanese houses in which spaces were enclosed by pulling thin screens across.

[rataplan]

A very refined print of Kikugawa Eizan.