Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji

Surely the most famous piece of Japanese art is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushira Hokusai. It has become iconic enough that, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, it can be recognized by even those who know nothing about art and can be fodder for countless parodies.

The Great Wave is part of a book, published in Japan in 1830 called 36 Views of Mount Fuji, one of the most famous books of the Ukiyo-e woodblock print style of popular art in Japan from the 17th century until World War I. They were cheap: A single Ukiyo-e image could be bought for roughly the price of a bowl of noodles.

Hokusai (1760-1849) was about 70 years old when he published 36 Views and had been working as an artist since the age of 14. In his 88-year lifetime, he drew, painted and carved something like 30,000 works. Three years after publishing 36 Views, he began signing his work as “Old Man Mad With Painting.”

As early as 1805, he had begun making pictures with the theme of fishermen in a boat fighting great waves.

And even after the Great Wave, he kept working the theme, including in his black-and-white sketchbook 100 Views of Mount Fuji.

He seems to have begun making the images for 36 Views somewhere about 1826. And it was in the years after that a new European pigment, Prussian blue, made its way to Japan. And so, some of the 36 Views are in the old style and some with the new blue pigment, which Hokusai seemed to enjoy experimenting with. The Great Wave would not have been possible without Prussian blue. An advertisement for the book emphasized the new color.

But it is important to pay attention to the other images in the series. It is called 36 Views, but Hokusai couldn’t stop and later added an additional 10 images, bringing the total up to 46. They were published and republished multiple times during Hokusai’s life, and each new printing differs slightly from the first, sometimes with different colors, sometimes with new details carved into the woodblock.

There is no set order for the images, but the ones below are in one of the published sequences. I wanted to post them all for two reasons. First because they give context to the Great Wave, but also because the whole set is great and should be known to anyone who loves art. I have loved them since I first encountered them more than 50 years ago.