Notebook of views of Mt. Fuji

The title's invocation of a notebook (chō) signals an album or sequence of small impressions of Fuji rather than a single monumental view, a format Maekawa Senpan favored for sustained meditation on a subject. Where Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views and Hiroshige's later series treated Fuji within the meisho-e convention of celebrated places, Senpan's sosaku-hanga approach pares the mountain back to its essential silhouette, often paired with a foreground motif — a tiled roof, a grove, a stretch of paddy — drawn from his everyday observation. Each leaf would have been carved into its own set of cherry blocks and printed by the artist on washi, the bokashi at the base of the cone softening into mist or evening color. The intimacy of the album form suits his temperament: rather than the grandeur of a single oban-format Fuji, the notebook accumulates a series of quiet, personal encounters with the mountain, each carrying the irregularities of hand printing.