Tenpōzan at the Mouth of the Aji River in Settsu Province (Sesshū Ajikawaguchi Tenpōzan)

Tenpozan at the Mouth of the Aji River in Settsu Province (Sesshu Ajikawaguchi Tenpozan), produced around 1834, is a design from Katsushika Hokusai's series One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (Chie no umi) or a closely related coastal sequence and depicts the artificial hill of Tenpozan, raised in 1831 from the silt dredged from the Aji River in present-day Osaka. The new hill rapidly became a famous viewing place for ships entering the busy port of Osaka, and Hokusai uses the high vantage to look out across crowded shipping lanes and the open sea. As a ukiyo-e print, the design balances the documentary impulse of recording a recent civic project with the landscape lyricism that defined his Edo ukiyo-e output of the 1830s. Travellers and dockworkers cluster on the hillside while sailboats fan across the harbour and Prussian blue washes the water and sky. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London preserves an impression of the print, where the publisher's seal and censor marks can be studied alongside the carved water patterns characteristic of late-Edo printing. The image is a valuable record of urban expansion and maritime commerce in nineteenth-century western Japan, as well as a continuation of Hokusai's lifelong fascination with views over water. The V&A holdings make it accessible for comparative study against the Fuji and Bridges series.