Hokusai Gallery (Guide)

Katsushika Hokusai’s printmaking opened Edo visual culture to the world through compositional experiments and series—above all the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). Across a career of some seventy years he reinvented his style again and again; the landscape prints of his later years are prized for compositions that earlier ukiyo-e had seldom attempted.

This gallery draws on The Met’s public-domain holdings and prepares publication around Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji—including South Wind, Clear Sky (Red Fuji), Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), and Storm below Mount Fuji. Planned as thirty-six designs, the series grew by ten more in response to its popularity and finally comprises forty-six prints. Mount Fuji is the stated subject, yet the lives and labors of people placed before it give the cycle its depth. Two sumō prints retain romaji wrestler names for now, because kanji forms have not yet been verified in primary sources.