Comment by Findecanor
2 years ago
One interesting detail about the Great Wave that came up in those videos is that apparently none of the known Edo-era prints in existence is (believed to be) an actual original. All of them show one or more signs of being a copy, or a copy-of-a-copy.
Copyright did not exist in Japan at the time, so copying of popular woodblock prints happened a lot. And each time, it had to be traced, carved and printed by hand.
Dave Bull's work is nothing short of amazing. He looked at multiple prints in detail, compared them against each other and knowing the nature of copying artefacts, he attempted to discern the original strokes and cuts as much as possible.
The original was destroyed as it was pasted to the block for the carver to cut its image. Then many impressions are printed with the blocks. The blocks wear and are damaged over time so new parts of blocks or whole new blocks are swapped out. Eventually, somebody creates a whole new set of blocks, and so on.