Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji), Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1830–32. Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper, 25.4 × 38.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain (Met Open Access, CC0).
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Ukiyo-e
Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji)
Katsushika Hokusai · c. 1830–32
The painter
Katsushika Hokusai
Hokusai worked for seventy years, used more than thirty art names, and produced something in the order of thirty thousand designs — prints, paintings, book illustrations and the fifteen volumes of sketches known as the Manga, which were studies for students rather than anything resembling modern comics. The work everyone knows, the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, was begun when he was around seventy. He was explicit about considering himself a late developer: in a famous postscript he wrote that nothing he produced before seventy was worth counting, and that if he were granted until ninety he might finally understand how to draw.
Nearby
Related works
Kajikazawa in Kai Province
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
What to look at
A phenomenon rather than a view: under particular conditions in late summer and early autumn, with the snow nearly gone and the sun low, Fuji's flank turns red. Hokusai gives the whole right-hand mass of the sheet to it and allows himself almost nothing else — a band of blue sky with a row of stylised white clouds along the bottom of it, and a dark green skirt of forest at the base. There are no figures, which is rare in the series. The printing is the interesting part: the red is applied with a graded wash, dark at the summit and lightening downward, which the printer achieved by wiping pigment unevenly on the block before each impression. That means no two impressions are identical, and the quality of the gradation is the main thing collectors compare between copies.