One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei), Vol. 3

Volume Three of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei), published in 1835, completes the ambitious cycle in which Katsushika Hokusai sought to depict every conceivable aspect of the sacred peak. Where the earlier volumes ranged across seasons, vantage points, and folkloric episodes, the third volume often reaches into the realm of legend, weather, and cosmology, depicting Fuji rising through clouds, framed by dragons, glimpsed across roiling seas, or seen by laborers and pilgrims at the most extreme times of day. The print medium here is the ehon, the illustrated book, in which Hokusai's line drawings are translated into woodblock with subtle ink gradations, giving each page the immediacy of brushwork. This austere palette focuses attention on Hokusai's draftsmanship, the very quality for which he was already known across Japan. As an exemplar of late Edo ukiyo-e bookmaking, Fugaku hyakkei Volume 3 demonstrates how the ukiyo-e print tradition could absorb landscape, history, and religious imagery into a single popular form. The Harvard Art Museums hold this volume within a distinguished collection of Hokusai's illustrated books, where the sequence of compositions can be followed page by page. For collectors of Japanese woodblock art, Volume Three is essential to understanding Hokusai's late vision of Fuji as not just a mountain but a cosmic constant around which the life of Japan turned.