Sangi Takamura, from the series "One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)"
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Sangi Takamura, designed about 1835, is one of the surviving prints from Katsushika Hokusai's unfinished series One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki). The series sought to illustrate the canonical Heian poetry anthology Hyakunin isshu by visualizing each verse as if explained to a child by a country nurse, a conceit that allowed Hokusai to ground aristocratic poetry in working-class life. Takamura, a ninth-century courtier and poet exiled to the Oki Islands, composed a verse lamenting his departure across the sea, and Hokusai responds with a sweeping coastal scene in which fishermen and laborers work along the shore beneath a luminous expanse of water and sky. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the design typifies Hokusai's late landscape practice, treating literary subjects as opportunities to depict Japanese geography in carefully rendered atmospheric depth. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression, which preserves the cool, layered blues that establish the sea and the soft cloud bands at the horizon. The ukiyo-e print integrates figures of working fishermen with the courtly resonance of Takamura's exile, exemplifying Katsushika Hokusai's habit of translating Heian melancholy into observable nineteenth-century life. The series remained incomplete at the time of Hokusai's death, with only twenty-seven designs cut and printed before publication ceased, which makes surviving sheets like Sangi Takamura important documents of the artist's ambitions in his seventies. Collectors prize the print both for its lyrical landscape composition and for its place within one of Hokusai's most personal late projects.
1821
Color woodblock print with metallic pigments; surimono shikishiban
1822
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
1822
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
c. 1832
Color woodblock print; oban
c. 1845/48
Color woodblock print; oban
c. 1845/48
Color woodblock print; oban
1921
Color woodblock print
c. 1842
Color woodblock print; oban
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Sangi Takamura, from the series "One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)" was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) in 1835/36.
Yes — Sangi Takamura, from the series "One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)" is part of the One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki) series by Katsushika Hokusai.
Sangi Takamura, from the series "One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)" depicts hyakunin isshu and landscapes.