One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei), Volumes 1 & 2

One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei), Volumes 1 & 2, is a cornerstone of Japanese illustrated book art and one of the most ambitious projects in Katsushika Hokusai's long career. Published from 1834, this multi-volume picture book brought together more than a hundred designs in which the sacred mountain is seen in every imaginable mood, season, and circumstance: from beneath waves, through pine boughs, beyond city rooftops, across rice fields, and inside the dreams of the gods. Unlike the polychrome Thirty-Six Views series, Fugaku hyakkei is printed in ink with limited tonal accents, an austerity that focuses attention on Hokusai's draftsmanship, his command of line, and his inventive compositional thinking. Working at the peak of late Edo ukiyo-e, Hokusai treats Fuji not merely as scenery but as the central organizing image of Japanese visual culture, the still center around which weather, labor, festival, and history wheel. Volumes One and Two contain many of the most reproduced designs in his oeuvre, including views of Fuji from sea, mountain, river, and city, each accompanied by elegantly composed text passages. As a Hokusai woodblock work, the book had outsized influence on later Japanese print and painting and on European modernists who encountered it in the late nineteenth century. The Harvard Art Museums preserve a fine set, where the impression and binding reveal how seriously this ukiyo-e project was treated. For collectors, it remains a foundational acquisition in any serious library of Japanese woodblock illustration.