Nikuhitsuga were a form of Japanese painting

Japanese painting

is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese visual arts, encompassing a wide variety of genres and styles. As with the history of Japanese arts in general, the long history of Japanese painting exhibits synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics and adaptation of...

  in the ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e

' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

art style. Though the woodblock prints

Woodblock printing in Japan

Woodblock printing in Japan is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre; however, it was also used very widely for printing books in the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books, long before the advent of movable type, but was only...

 of this genre have become so famous in the West as to become almost synonymous with the term "ukiyo-e", in fact most ukiyo-e artists were painters as well as printmakers, with much the same style and subjects. Some turned to painting at the end of a career in prints, while some, like Miyagawa Chōshun

Miyagawa Choshun

was a Japanese painter in the ukiyo-e style. Founder of the Miyagawa school, he and his pupils are among the few ukiyo-e artists to have never created woodblock prints. He was born in Miyagawa, in Owari province, but lived much of his later life in Edo, where he died...

 and a number of the artists of the Kaigetsudō school

Kaigetsudo school

The Kaigetsudō school was a school of ukiyo-e painting and printmaking founded in Edo around 1700-1714. It is often said that the various Kaigetsudō artists' styles are so similar, many scholars find it nearly impossible to differentiate them; thus, many Kaigetsudō paintings are attributed to the...

, never made prints and only worked in paintings.

Though advances in printing technology advanced over the course of the Edo period

Edo period

The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

(1603-1868), allowing for the production of more and more elaborate and colorful prints, the medium of painting always allowed a greater degree of freedom to the artist, and involved a much larger product in any case; the paintings of many ukiyo-e artists survive today and are exquisite in their bright colors, attention to detail, and bold brush strokes.