“America”: Enjoying Hot Air Balloons1867
Hot air balloons float above an imagined American city of grand buildings and flags, while elegantly dressed men and women gather below to watch. More about this work
About this work
Hot air balloons float above an imagined American city of grand buildings and flags, while elegantly dressed men and women gather below to watch. Utagawa Yoshitora never travelled abroad, and his views of foreign countries, made in the 1860s as Japan was opening to the West, combined details from imported illustrated papers and books with a good deal of invention. Such triptychs offered a Japanese audience an exciting, if fanciful, window on the wider world.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Triptych
- Three sheets designed to sit side by side and read as one wide picture.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 2007.49.222
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Prints
- Department
- Asian Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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