Snowy Morning from Koishikawa (Koishikawa yuki no ashita), from the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"

Snowy Morning from Koishikawa is one of Katsushika Hokusai's most atmospheric prints in the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Designed around 1825, the print looks out from a teahouse balcony in the Koishikawa district of Edo on a clear winter morning after fresh snowfall. Three women in patterned kimonos take in the view; one points toward distant Mount Fuji as a flock of birds crosses the white roofs of the city below. The composition's strong horizontals, the snow-covered roofs, the eaves of the teahouse, the river beyond, are softened by gentle vertical accents of bare tree branches and the figures themselves. Hokusai uses the imported Prussian blue with great restraint, allowing the warmth of the figures' kimonos and the orange of the building's wood to balance the icy palette. As an ukiyo-e print, the design captures the intimacy of urban life paused before a sacred view, showing how Edo ukiyo-e could combine refined genre with sweeping landscape. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression and presents it as a defining example of Katsushika Hokusai's late style, where civic life in Edo, the world of teahouses, geisha, and seasonal pleasures, is bound together with the iconic mountain that gives the Fugaku sanjurokkei series its name.