One mountain,
forty-six ways of seeing it
Hokusai set Mount Fuji in the daily life of fishermen, travellers, craftsmen and the city. Sometimes the mountain is the subject of the picture; sometimes it is only a small triangle in the distance. Each of these forty-six prints is a view of Fuji from somewhere, so here they are not in numbered order: the mountain goes back to the centre, and each print goes back to the direction it looks from.
The series makes heavy use of Prussian blue, then imported from Europe and called bero-ai (ベロ藍) in Japanese. Blue is the visual mark of the series; every line in this exhibition uses only this one blue.
The directions are schematic, not exact geography: each is the rough direction, seen from Mount Fuji, of the old province where the pictured place lies. Works from the same area are spread along arcs and concentric rings so that they do not cover one another; the three at the centre show the mountain itself.
- Artist
- Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), about seventy when he began the series
- Published
- c. 1830–1833, published by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō)
- Prints
- Originally 36; 10 more were added because the series sold so well, 46 in all
One mountain,
thirty-six ways of seeing it
Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fuji sanjūrokkei was published in 1858, the year he died. All 36 prints are vertical compositions. Here too the mountain goes back to the centre, and each print to the direction it looks from.
The directions are schematic, not exact geography: each is the rough direction, seen from Mount Fuji, of the old province where the pictured place lies. Works from the same area are spread along arcs and concentric rings so that they do not cover one another.
- Artist
- Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858)
- Published
- 1858, the year Hiroshige died
- Format
- Vertical
- Prints
- 36 in all