Rice Paddies at Ono in Suruga Province (Sunshu Ono shinden), from the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"

Rice Paddies at Ono in Suruga Province offers one of the most agriculturally grounded compositions in Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Designed around 1825, the print looks across the flooded paddies of the Ono area in Suruga Province, where peasants and travelers move along raised paths between newly planted fields. Hokusai positions Mount Fuji in the middle distance, partly obscured by a screen of leafy trees and the silhouettes of working figures, so that the sacred peak emerges from the labor of the countryside rather than dominating it from above. The composition demonstrates his skill at constructing space through layered diagonals, with water reflections, foliage, and figural groups arranged in measured intervals. As with other prints in the Fugaku sanjurokkei, Hokusai relies on the imported Prussian blue pigment and on subtle gradations to evoke distance and atmosphere, integrating sky and water into a unified palette. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this ukiyo-e print as part of its extensive Hokusai holdings, where the Thirty-six Views series is documented in close detail. For readers exploring Katsushika Hokusai and the broader Edo ukiyo-e tradition, the design illustrates how he treated rural Japan, presenting the cultivated land around Suruga as both an economic landscape and a stage for the imagination of Mount Fuji.