Hokusai and four other ukiyo-e masters featured . There’s a natural tendency to associate everything done by historical figures with a weighty significance. If a painter’s work is still celebrated long after their passing, then surely when they picked up a brush it was because they felt an irrepressible need to capture the spirit of the era they lived in, to convey the emotions and truth of it to future generations, right? Maybe.
But sometimes even history’s greatest artists, in taking inspiration from their observations and surroundings, must have had times where they thought, “Wow, look at those cute kitties!” For example, that feline trio pictured above? They were painted by Utagawa Hiroshige (1761-1829), one of Japan’s most famous ukiyo-e artists. Adorable and classy, it’s a piece of art that’d look nice hanging on a wall, or adorning a shirt, which brings us to Uniqlo’s latest T-shirt line . The Wagara Dobutsu (Japanese-print Animals) collection is a collaboration between Uniqlo and Tokyo-based ukiyo-e publisher Unsodo .
Each of the five shirts draws from the artwork of a different painter from Japan’s Edo era , the peaceful period that followed centuries of civil war and gave Japanese society enough breathing room for a renaissance of arts and culture. ▼ The Hiroshige shirt has one more cat on the sleeve. No discussion of Edo artists is complete without mentioning Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), whose Great Wave of Kanagawa is perhaps the best-know.