Mount Fuji from across the Lake at Hakone

Mount Fuji from across the Lake at Hakone is an 1849 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), a late master of the Edo ukiyo-e tradition who, alongside Katsushika Hokusai, defined the canonical image of Mount Fuji for nineteenth-century Japanese and later for European audiences. Lake Ashi, often referred to as the lake at Hakone, sits in the caldera of an ancient volcano in the Hakone mountains southwest of Edo and offers one of the most celebrated viewpoints onto Fuji. Hiroshige composes the print with the lake's surface providing a broad middle plane, the Hakone shore arranged as foreground, and Fuji's symmetrical cone rising in the distance behind intervening hills. As is characteristic of his treatment of Fuji, he avoids the dramatic exaggeration that Hokusai sometimes pursued and instead places the mountain in measured relation to the human scale of boats, travelers, and shoreside dwellings. As a landscape print, Mount Fuji from across the Lake at Hakone shows Hiroshige working within a subject he returned to repeatedly across his career, including in dedicated Fuji series and within the Tokaido and Kisokaido cycles. The 1849 date positions this work in the productive late middle period of his career, between the major road series of the 1830s and 1840s and the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo on which his final reputation rests. The Hakone region was itself the tenth station on the Tokaido, and views of its lake and mountains were a staple of meisho-e production. This impression is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.