Hokusai Katsushika

By the 1800s, when the artists Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige lived and worked, commoners enjoyed the numerous amenities of Edo (Tokyo), the world's largest city (pop. ca. 800,000). They launched businesses, perfected crafts, gained leisure time and literacy, traveled a coherent system of safe roads, and enjoyed art, poetry, a seemingly limitless taste for novelty, and the income to indulge them. Ukiyo-e prints - 'pictures of the floating world' - reflect the lives of the Edo commoners. In Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints, we see the faces of this new middle class, both the excitement and drudgery of their daily activities, and favorite views of the landmarks and natural wonders they beheld. Most of the 200 ukiyo-e prints in this book (100 by Hokusai, 100 by Hiroshige) are from the distinguished James A. Michener Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Included in their entirety are Hokusai's series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and Hiroshige's series, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road, along with selections from their other major series.

Hokusai achieved enormous success with the publication between 1829 and 1832 of his series of colour prints 'Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji' (Fugaku sanjûrokkei). That series was later extended by a further ten prints. Following this he went on to design these 102 views of Fuji that were published in three volumes over a period of about fifteen years. They were printed from blocks made in the workshop of the master carver Egawa Tomekichi. For these books, Hokusai chose to work in monochrome: a fine black line and various subtle shades of grey, concentrating on eccentric and imaginative compositions, rather than the realistic depiction of actual places. Mount Fuji is a popular subject for Japanese art because of 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. Mt. Fuji was seen from an early time as the source of the secret of immortality, a tradition that was at the heart of Hokusai's own obsession with the mountain.