Hokusai's Landscapes

The first book to focus exclusively on Hokusai’s landscapes, by one of the world’s leading ukiyo-e specialists

The best known of all Japanese artists, Katsushika Hokusai was active as a painter, book illustrator and print designer throughout his ninety-year lifespan. Yet his most famous works of all – the colour woodblock landscape prints issued in series, beginning with Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji – were produced within a relatively short time, in an amazing burst of creative energy that lasted from about 1830 to 1836.

Hokusai’s landscapes not only revolutionized Japanese printmaking but within a few decades of his death had become icons of world art as well. With stunning colour reproductions of works from the largest collection of Japanese prints outside Japan, this book examines the magnetic appeal of Hokusai’s designs and the circumstances of their creation.

The book includes all published prints of the artist’s eight major landscape series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–32), A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (1833–34), Snow, Moon and Flowers (1833), Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands (1832–33), One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (1832–33), Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (1834), A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry (1833) and One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse (1835).

Working prolifically in the years just before Japan opened to the West in 1853, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was the first Japanese artist to be internationally recognized. His cleverly composed ukiyo-e prints of everyday life and the landscapes of Edo Japan arrived in a 19th-century Europe gripped by Japonisme-mania, where they influenced artists such as Degas, Gauguin, Manet and Van Gogh.

About the Author

Sarah E. Thompson is Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.