The Mouseion · The Season · The Floating World

The Floating World

Japanese prints from Hokusai to Hiroshige

Ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world": actors, beauties, travellers on the great roads, and the mountain and the wave. Mass-produced and cheap in their day, these woodblock prints changed how Europe painted.

Walk inThe whole museum

When it’s on

In The Season’s hall, off the Hall: May 2026.

The works

The works are chosen when the exhibition is hung, a few days before it opens.

Where the works come from

Every work in the Mouseion is a real piece, out of copyright everywhere, shown from the open collections of the museums that hold it — each label names the original’s museum and links to its page there.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Open Access
• The Art Institute of Chicago — public-domain collection
• The Cleveland Museum of Art — Open Access
• Wikimedia Commons — public-domain photographs of works held elsewhere