View of Mount Fuji at sunrise on New Year's Day

Isoda Koryusai's View of Mount Fuji at sunrise on New Year's Day, dated 1767 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, is an auspicious composition tied to one of the most resonant moments in the Edo calendar. The combination of Fuji and the first sunrise of the year — hatsuhinode — carried potent associations of renewal, longevity, and good fortune that printmakers exploited each January. Koryusai approaches the subject with the lyrical restraint typical of his Meiwa-period style, allowing the volcano's pale silhouette to anchor a sky brushed by the gradual emergence of light. Unlike the towering, climactic Fujis of later artists, Koryusai's mountain is a calm presence: a symbol rather than a spectacle. This poetic handling links the print to the broader tradition of Edo bijin-ga and seasonal kacho-e, where landscape carries emotional weight without overshadowing human or narrative content. Koryusai's interest in calendar imagery and seasonal markers would persist throughout his career, surfacing in the iconographic logic of series such as Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, which paired Yoshiwara courtesans with the rhythms of the year. The pale wash of the sky and the careful gradation around the mountain demonstrate Koryusai's command of color block alignment in the still-developing nishiki-e medium. Whether commissioned as a surimono-like New Year greeting or as part of a published sequence, the sheet would have carried a charge of celebratory meaning for its first audience. Today the print survives as an early instance of Fuji as auspicious subject and as a quiet example of Koryusai's ability to compress symbolic content into restrained pictorial means.