Picture of First Pant Fitting, from the series Collection of Precious Children of Shichigosan Festival

Among the most popular Japanese prints in the West were the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ukiyo-e (literally “pictures of the floating world”) that depicted urban leisure pursuits, everyday life, and famous landscapes. Such prints presented Western artists with radically new approaches to figuration and compositional design in their flattening of three-dimensional forms, expressive stylization of the human body, and emphasis on decorative lines and patterns.