Mt. Dokan

Mt. Dokan, an undated landscape print by Katsushika Hokuju (active c. 1789-1843), takes up one of the modest topographic eminences of the Edo periphery, almost certainly Dokan-yama (Dokan Hill), the prominent rise in the northern Edo countryside named after the fifteenth-century warrior Ota Dokan, who is traditionally credited with the founding of Edo Castle. The print is preserved on ukiyo-e.org (ukiyo-e.org/image/jaodb/Hokuju_Shotei-No_Series-Mt_Dokan-00028503-020125-F06) where it is recorded as part of the Japanese Art Open Database. Hokuju, who studied under Katsushika Hokusai and adopted the second character of his teacher's go as the first character of his own, is best known for his uki-e (perspective picture) landscape prints, in which the European-derived single-point perspective that had entered Japanese popular printmaking in the eighteenth century was deployed in the service of Edo and Tokaido topography. The Dokan-yama subject belongs to the meisho-e (famous-place pictures) tradition that organised much of the popular landscape printmaking of late Edo, in which the surrounds of the shogunal capital were systematically documented through topographical views of hills, temples, river crossings and viewing platforms. The composition typically organises the eminence of Dokan-yama as the central topographical anchor, with a foreground of figures or vegetation and a distant view across the Edo plain; the perspectival structure that distinguishes Hokuju's work draws the eye into a calibrated middle distance. Within his career, Mt. Dokan belongs to the run of Edo topographical subjects through which the artist contributed to the popular landscape printmaking of the early nineteenth century, sitting within a broader Hokusai-school output that included the parallel Senju Bridge and Ryogoku subjects represented elsewhere in his oeuvre.