Ask most people to picture Japanese art and they will picture a wave. Under the Wave off Kanagawa — the "Great Wave" — is one of the most reproduced images on earth. Fewer people know that it is a single print from a series, and that the series is one of the great achievements of any printmaker anywhere.
A mountain in forty-six views
Katsushika Hokusai was around seventy when the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi issued Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji between about 1830 and 1832. The series sold so well that ten more designs were added, so the "thirty-six" views actually number forty-six. The first thirty-six are printed with blue outlines; the added ten use black, which is one way collectors tell them apart.
The idea was simple and, at the time, unusual: a landscape series in which the subject is not the places but a single mountain seen from all of them. Fuji is sometimes the entire picture, as in Fine Wind, Clear Morning (better known as Red Fuji). More often it sits far off, a small triangle behind a bridge, a barrel-maker, a rice field, or a wave, while ordinary people go about their work in the foreground. Hokusai's real subject is the relationship between the mountain and the country around it.
Why the blues are so blue
Look at an original impression and the first thing you notice is the blue. Traditional Japanese printmakers used indigo and dayflower blue, both of which fade badly. In the late 1820s, imported Prussian blue (bero-ai, from "Berlin blue") became affordable in Japan. It was intense, stable, and could be printed in graded washes. Hokusai's series was one of the first major uses of it, and the deep, saturated skies and water of these prints were partly a demonstration of the new pigment. When you see a version of Red Fuji with a washed-out sky, you are usually seeing a faded late impression or a poor reproduction.
Three prints worth knowing beyond the Wave
Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji). Early autumn, southerly wind, the mountain flushed red at dawn. Three colors, almost no line, and one of the most confident compositions in print history. Early impressions have a softly graded sky; later ones lose the gradation. See our Red Fuji print.
Rainstorm Beneath the Summit (Black Fuji). The companion piece. The same mountain, but a lightning storm rages in the valley below the peak while the summit stands in clear light. Hokusai lets you see two weathers at once.
Fuji from Surugadai in Edo. A busy Edo street on a rise, workers on a rooftop, and Fuji floating above a line of houses — the mountain as a daily presence in the city, which is how most people who bought these prints actually experienced it.
How to hang them
These are horizontal prints, roughly 3:2. They read best at 24×16 inches or larger, where the woodgrain texture and the graded color have room. Hang them at eye level with a wide white or off-white mat and a thin black or natural wood frame; the prints were designed to sit inside a border, and the mat restores that. Avoid direct sunlight — the originals faded for a reason, and while modern pigment inks are far more stable, there's no point tempting it.
About our prints
Our Hokusai and Hiroshige prints are reproduced from open-access scans of original impressions in museum collections. We choose the best-preserved impression available, clean the scan without repainting anything, and print to order on archival matte paper in the United States. Every work in the series is in the public domain. Browse the Japanese woodblock collection.