Mt. Fuji with Cranes and Fishing Boats

Mt. Fuji with Cranes and Fishing Boats is a leaf from the 1873 album of fifteen paintings by Mori Kansai held by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16J), executed in ink and color on silk. The composition combines three of the most powerful auspicious motifs in Japanese painting: Mount Fuji as the symbol of long life and steady form, cranes as the symbol of longevity and good fortune, and fishing boats as the emblem of the abundant sea and a peaceful working life. The convention of pairing Fuji with cranes and with sailing or fishing boats goes back at least to the seventeenth century in Japanese decorative painting and printmaking, and continued as a popular subject through the early twentieth century. Kansai's handling — the broad cone of Fuji in pale washes, the cranes flying in close paired formation across the foreground, the boats indicated as small graphic marks on the sea — places the leaf squarely in the kind of auspicious shōchikubai-adjacent painting that albums of this kind were designed to deliver. Signed and dated 1873.