surimono

In late eighteenth-century Edo, a new kind of print circulated among poets, merchants, and aristocrats that could not be bought in any shop. Called surimono, literally "printed things," these were private commissions distributed as seasonal gifts, New Year greetings, and announcements of cultural gatherings. They appeared in small editions of twenty or thirty copies, each pressed on heavy mulberry paper with metallic inks, embossing, and blind-printing techniques that ordinary woodblock prints could not afford. The result was an object that announced its own preciousness.

The name combines two Japanese words: suru, "to print" or "to rub," and mono, "thing." Suru shares its root with the act of rubbing ink into paper, the same verb used for counterfeit coin-making, which gave surimono an inadvertent edge in the culture of conspicuous refinement. Poets of the kyōka school, who wrote playful comic verse, commissioned the finest artists of the period to illustrate their work. Katsushika Hokusai produced dozens of surimono between 1795 and 1825, including compositions of astonishing delicacy.

What made surimono expensive was not the image but the technique. Printers used gofun, a white pigment made from ground oyster shells, to create raised textures on fabric and feathers. Gold and silver dust was applied by hand to specific areas after printing. Some sheets required more than twenty separate woodblocks. These refinements made surimono unsuitable for mass production and kept them in the hands of the cultured few.

Western collectors discovered surimono in the 1860s when Japan opened to foreign trade. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the largest collections outside Japan, acquired largely through the efforts of Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow in the 1880s. European museums followed, and by 1900 surimono had become a shorthand in Western art circles for the highest achievement of Japanese printmaking. The word entered English without alteration, as so many Japanese art terms do.