Mount Fuji in 36 Views: Hokusai's Mountain

The Met calls Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, published around 1830–32, one of the world's greatest series of images of a single place, seen under different conditions and from different points of view. The place is the mountain synonymous with Japan.¹

The series created such a sensation that the publisher, Eijudō, expanded it to forty-six prints in the end.¹

Put the two most famous views side by side. In South Wind, Clear Sky, the “Red Fuji,” everything is clear, brilliant and calm. In Storm below Mount Fuji, a bolt of lightning cuts across the dark base of the mountain: a summer sky has turned violent below the summit.^{1, 2}

Same mountain, same shape, opposite moods. That is the whole idea of the series, and it shows the range of Hokusai's vision.¹

The series is known for a particular blue, which the Japanese called bero-ai, “Berlin indigo,” newly introduced by Dutch merchants.¹ It is the pigment we know as Prussian blue, and it gives the skies and waters of the series their depth.

Not every view is a landscape. Here Fuji appears far away, framed between the two buildings of a famous kimono shop on Edo's busiest street, Surugachō.³

Look at the roof: its triangle echoes the shape of the mountain.³ Daily life in the foreground, the sacred mountain in the distance.