Introduction

This site is primarily intended for interested (or obsessive) ukiyo-e print collectors who wish to attempt to trace the provenance of their prints. The site may also be of use to ukiyo-e dealers or auction house specialists.

Until relatively recently, a site like this was not a practical possibility because of the extreme rarity of many early ukiyo-e auction catalogues. In the past few years, however, many of these early ukiyo-e auction catalogues have been digitized and can now be found online. For this, we can thank, in particular, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the institut national d’histoire de l'art (“INHA”), the Smithsonian, the Getty Research Institute library, various other libraries and research institutions, and the Internet Archive (which hosts much of the digitized material). We hope other institutions with existing collections of auction catalogues will eventually follow suit. We also wish to express our gratitude to Rolf Degener who made his library of early ukiyo-e auction catalogues available for this project, to Andreas Marks for directing us to the INHA website, as well as to Jeffrey Eger of Jeffrey Eger Auction Catalogues (whose warehouse of auction catalogues (of all kinds) must be seen to be believed).

The list of included catalogues is provided as a searchable pdf file.  Where a catalogue has been digitized and can be found on-line, the appropriate url is provided underneath the catalogue reference. We will continue to add additional material to the site in the future as time or opportunity permits.

While there are still many missing catalogues, this site covers approximately 1,900-2,000 auction catalogues and early ukiyo-e exhibition catalogues and books, as well as various dealer catalogues. The site limits its coverage mostly to “primitive era” and “golden age era” ukiyo-e artists.  A list of covered artists can be found here as a searchable pdf file.  To be clear, this site does not cover auction catalogue records of prints by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, or Yoshitoshi. This limitation is primarily due to issues of practicality.  The artists listed above seem to have been responsible for far more prints than the earlier artists covered by this site and surviving copies of these prints exist in far greater numbers than prints by the earlier artists. [1] Finally, the auction catalogue records typically provide fewer illustrations and relatively non-useful descriptions of the prints by some of these later artists.  For artists that are not covered on this site, a researcher may wish to consider going to www.artnet.com. Artnet.com includes auction sales by ukiyo-e artists not included here with descriptions of prints (and, where they exist, illustrations). The drawback to Artnet is it is a commercial site and it only covers prints sold since approximately 1990 (whereas this site covers auction records dating back into the nineteenth century).

This site permits a user to search for prints by an individual artist, by several artists simultaneously, or by all the covered artists. It indicates the date of a sale or exhibition, the auction house, exhibition forum, or dealer as applicable, the seller or lender of a print (where known), the purchaser of a print (where known), the description of the print, and whether the print was illustrated in the catalogue or book. The site also lists a print’s prior owners (where known) and prior cases where the print has come up for auction (or otherwise for sale in the public record). Finally, if it is known that a referenced print is now in a museum collection, this information (including the museum’s accession number for the print) is also provided.[2] (No doubt, there are a significant number of prints contained in this database that are not currently marked as being in a museum collection even though they are, in fact, in a museum collection. It is not always easy to determine whether a particular print is in a museum collection.)