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Similar Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji, A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife | ||
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景, Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) is a series of landscape prints by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760–1849). The series depicts Mount Fuji from different locations and in various seasons and weather conditions.
Contents
The series was produced from c. 1830 to 1832, when Hokusai was in his seventies and at the height of his career, and published by Nishimura Yohachi. Among the prints are three of Hokusai's most famous: Under the Wave off Kanagawa, South Wind, Clear Sky, and Rainstorm Beneath the Summit. The series has been described as the artist's "indisputable colour-print masterpiece".
History
Mount Fuji is a popular subject for Japanese art due to its cultural and religious significance. This belief can be traced to The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, where a goddess deposits the elixir of life on the peak. As the historian Henry Smith explains, "Thus from an early time, Mt. Fuji was seen as the source of the secret of immortality, a tradition that was at the heart of Hokusai's own obsession with the mountain."
The most famous single image from the series is widely known in English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa-oki nami-ura), although a more literal translation might be, "Off Kanagawa, the back (or underside) of a wave." It depicts three boats being threatened by a large wave while Mount Fuji rises in the background. While generally assumed to be a tsunami, the wave was probably intended to simply be a large ocean wave.
Each of the images was made through a process whereby an image drawn on paper was used to guide the carving of a wood block. This block was then covered with ink and applied to paper to create the image (see Woodblock printing in Japan for further details). The complexity of Hokusai's images includes the wide range of colors he used, which required the use of a separate block for each color appearing in the image.
While Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is the most famous ukiyo-e series to focus on Mount Fuji, there are several other works with the same subject, including Hiroshige's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Hokusai's subsequent book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.
Original thirty-six
These images are of modern facsimile prints made using the same techniques.
Exhibitions
A collection of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji prints contained in the wellness spa of the Costa Concordia was lost during the collision of the ship on January 13, 2012.
All forty-six prints (the original thirty-six plus the ten additions) were featured in the exhibition "Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji" at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian's museums of Asian art, in the spring of 2012.
The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji prints were displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as part of a Hokusai exhibit April 5 through August 9, 2015.