In the Tōtōmi Mountains (Tōtōmi san-chū)

Created around 1830 for the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, this print by Katsushika Hokusai depicts a group of sawyers working a giant timber high in the Totomi mountains of Shizuoka, with Mount Fuji visible in the distance through the triangular gap of the log they are cutting. The composition makes brilliant use of the diagonal beam: the angle of the timber leads the eye from the strenuously laboring sawyers in the foreground out to the distant silhouette of the mountain, equating in a single image the daily exertion of provincial life with the sacred geography of the volcano. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet exemplifies Hokusai's strategy throughout the Fuji series of using foregrounded human activity to frame the unchanging mountain, so that Fuji becomes a constant witness to the labor of the country. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves an impression of the print within its Hokusai holdings. The image celebrates the timber economy of central Honshu, where forests supplied the lumber that built and rebuilt Edo, Kyoto, and a network of provincial towns. The sawyers themselves are rendered with quick, decisive contours, conveying the physical effort of two-person sawing without sentimentalizing the work. The light blue distance and warm browns of the timber are characteristic of the palette that Berlin blue had recently made possible. This print is one of the most reproduced and most analyzed images in the Fuji series, and rightly so: its formal invention sits hand in hand with its sociological richness, presenting the volcano as a participant in the country's everyday economic life rather than as a remote ideal.