Joshu Ushibori

Joshu Ushibori is the abbreviated title of Joshu Ushibori Tsukudagawa, Ushibori in Hitachi Province on the Tsukuda River, from Katsushika Hokusai's series Fugaku Sanjurokkei, the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, issued by Nishimuraya Yohachi in Edo between roughly 1830 and 1833 with ten additional plates added shortly after. The Joshu Ushibori plate is among the series' quieter compositions: a moored boat with a canopied cabin and a fisherman on the bow casting feed for waterfowl, against the still water of an inlet on the Hitachi side of the lake-and-marsh country at the mouth of the Tone River, with Mount Fuji rising as a small distant cone in the upper register. The print is offered on Artsy at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/katsushika-hokusai-joshu-ushibori, and the listing should be understood as a contemporary impression of the Edo-period design. Hokusai (1760-1849) had already reorganized the genre of the meisho-e, the famous-place print, when this series appeared in his seventies, and the Thirty-six Views is structured not as a tour of Fuji from celebrated viewing platforms but as a survey of the mountain as it appears from work, weather, and trade across central and eastern Japan. The Ushibori plate makes that argument with unusual restraint, the human figures bent to a practical task with Fuji granted only the most modest place in the composition, an editorial decision that locates the sheet near the Sumida and Tama-river plates as one of the series' most domestic scenes. The Prussian blue, bero-ai, available to Nishimuraya in the early 1830s carries the water and sky, and the design depends on the relations among reflected mast, boat, and distant cone rather than on incident. The series transformed the place of landscape within ukiyo-e, opened the way for Hiroshige's later great series including the Tokaido Gojusan-tsugi, and gave the global imagination its enduring image of Fuji. The present sheet, read alongside the Hokusai impressions preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Tokyo National Museum, sits within that history. The contemporary 2024-listed date suggests a modern impression of the design, against which the original Nishimuraya state remains the standard.