The Jewel River in Musashi Province (Bushū Tamagawa)

The Jewel River in Musashi Province (Bushū Tamagawa) is another sheet from Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), the great landscape series begun around 1830 and published over several years. The Tamagawa, or Jewel River, was celebrated in Japanese poetry as one of the six famous rivers (mu-tamagawa) and was a familiar travel destination from Edo. Hokusai stages a tranquil scene in which a boatman poles a flat-bottomed ferry across calm water, low willows and banks frame the river, and Mount Fuji rises in the distance above pale graduated clouds. The composition rests on horizontal bands, with the broad expanse of the river occupying the lower half and the sky and mountain the upper half, divided by a single line of forested shore. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds this impression, which preserves the clear blues and finely registered key lines that distinguish good early printings of the series. Like other Edo ukiyo-e prints in the Mount Fuji set, the Tamagawa view shows how Hokusai used the mountain to anchor a vast variety of localized subjects, from urban rooftops to remote rural waterways. It is also a particularly poetic example of his approach: the boatman's small figure, the sound of water and birdsong implied by the open spaces, and the still presence of Fuji together translate centuries of classical river-imagery into the modern visual idiom of the woodblock print.