The Weir at Senju in Musashi Province (from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji)
- Date:
- early 1830s
- Medium:
- color woodblock print
- Source:
- Cleveland Museum of Art
The Weir at Senju in Musashi Province is one of the forty-six designs in Katsushika Hokusai's celebrated series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), published from around 1830. Senju, on the northern edge of Edo, was a busy post town and river crossing, and the weir referred to in the title controlled water from the Arakawa for irrigation. Hokusai sets a low horizon and frames Mount Fuji as a small, distant cone above a foreground of dikes, fishing platforms, and weir posts, with figures attending to nets or pulling boats. The arrangement is a perfect example of how the artist used Mount Fuji as a fixed compass point while letting daily working life occupy the bulk of the composition. Like the rest of the series, this Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) print made bold use of the imported Prussian blue pigment, which gave the sky and water a flat luminosity that previous landscape prints could not achieve. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds this impression. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji is widely recognized as the work that redefined the possibilities of the ukiyo-e print, shifting attention from the floating-world subjects of beauties and actors to a panoramic survey of how the sacred mountain shaped life around the Kanto plain. The Senju print epitomizes that program by showing the mountain as a quiet witness to the rivers and workers of Musashi Province.
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
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
The Weir at Senju in Musashi Province (from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji) was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) in early 1830s.
The Weir at Senju in Musashi Province (from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji) depicts landscapes and mount fuji.