Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
富嶽三十六景
'Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji' is Katsushika Hokusai's defining series, produced c. 1830–1832 and including 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa,' 'Red Fuji,' and 'Storm Below the Mountain.' Originally 36 prints, expanded to 46 by popular demand, the series remade landscape ukiyo-e and is the most internationally recognised body of Japanese woodblock work.
About This Collection
Hokusai was already 70 years old when he began the Fuji series. He had spent five decades cycling through pen names, schools, and stylistic experiments — yakusha-e for the Katsukawa school, surimono privately commissioned prints, the 'Hokusai Manga' sketchbook series, history paintings, ghost stories. The Fuji series consolidated all of those experiments into a single project: a treatment of the sacred mountain as both subject and structural anchor across thirty-six (then forty-six) compositions, each foregrounding a different human or weather scenario in front of the same fixed peak.
The series' technical innovations are as important as its compositional ones. Hokusai used Prussian blue — a synthetic pigment newly available in Edo through Dutch trade — to produce the deep saturated blues that became the series' signature tone. The block carving for 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura) is among the most demanding in ukiyo-e: the fractal claw-tipped wave, the dot-by-dot rendering of foam, and the alternation of Prussian blue with traditional indigo across the composition all required the most skilled carvers and printers Edo could supply.
The series sold extensively — strong enough that Nishimuraya Yohachi, the publisher, commissioned the ten supplementary prints that brought the total from 36 to 46. By the late nineteenth century, 'The Great Wave' was the single Japanese print most widely reproduced in Europe, and the series remains the most-recognised body of Japanese woodblock work worldwide. This collection gathers the Hanga catalogue's holdings from the series.
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Frequently Asked Questions
The series originally contained 36 prints, but ten additional prints — sometimes called the 'reverse Fuji' or supplementary set — were added due to commercial demand, bringing the final total to 46.
'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura) is the series' most famous print and is widely considered the single most-recognised work of Japanese art internationally. 'Red Fuji' (Gaifū kaisei) and 'Storm Below the Mountain' are the other two prints commonly cited as the series' high points.
The original 36 prints were produced approximately 1830–1832, when Hokusai was around 70–72 years old. The supplementary 10 prints followed in 1834. The publisher was Nishimuraya Yohachi.
Original 1830s strikes are extremely rare and almost entirely held by major museums. Most prints on the secondary market are nineteenth-century re-strikes (still hand-printed from the original blocks), Meiji-era reprintings, or twentieth-century reproductions. Authentication requires examining paper fibre, registration alignment, pigment composition (Prussian blue vs. modern blue), and provenance — typically through specialist appraisal.