Hokusai. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

The Library Essay

Forty-Six Views, Despite the Title

Katsushika Hokusai was in his seventies when he designed the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in the early 1830s, and the series sold so well that ten further prints were added to the promised thirty-six. It contains the Great Wave, probably the most reproduced image in all of Japanese art, and the red Fuji of a clear autumn morning, and in every sheet the sacred mountain sits somewhere, watched from teahouses, timber yards and fishing boats.

The prints ran on the newly affordable Prussian blue pigment, and when they reached Europe decades later they altered Western painting. Taschen's 2023 edition, presented by the curator Andreas Marks, reproduces the full series at large scale with traditional Japanese binding, treating a set of popular commercial prints as what they became, one of printing's permanent achievements.