A house of Provenance
The Floating World
Ukiyo-e — pictures of the floating world: the theaters, the road, the rain, the moon. For two and a half centuries the woodblock workshops of Edo printed the pleasures and weathers of ordinary life, and their sheets crossed the ocean and changed how the world sees.
Anyone can download these images. The moat is not the file. It is the curation — the finest impression of each design, chosen across the world’s open collections; the storytelling — what it is, why it matters, what to notice; and the print — EMA matte art paper, stretched canvas, or a box frame under acrylic. Provenance and wonder are the product.
The sourcing promise
Every reproduction follows a specific museum impression, named on its page with institution and accession number — drawn from open collections that place their scans in the public domain or under open access. The same design survives in many impressions, fading differently as fugitive pigments age; choosing the finest openly held impression is our curatorial act, and the impression note on each page tells you what varies.
The registry promise
No piece publishes without a CLEAR verdict from the family’s clearance registry. Classic ukiyo-e is public domain everywhere. Shin-hanga is gated by the design’s publication year — only designs published through 1930 appear here, cleared under the 95-year rule, regardless of how long the artist lived. Later museum photography of a public-domain print carries no new copyright. The rights line on every page — public domain; faithfully reproduced — is enforced in code, at the route, at checkout, and in CI.
The Floating World is a house of Provenance, sibling to The Firmament, Cartographer’s Dream, and Painted Myths, part of the Painted family. Read how a print was made →