One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki)

One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki) is the great unfinished cycle of Katsushika Hokusai's Iitsu period, planned as a hundred-print illustration of the Hyakunin Isshu, the canonical thirteenth-century anthology of one hundred classical waka compiled by Fujiwara no Teika, and published by Iseya Sanjiro beginning around 1835 or 1836. The premise of the project, encoded in its title, was that the most refined poetry of the classical Japanese court could be rendered intelligible to popular audiences through the pictorial commentary of a wet nurse, that is, through the homely imaginative gloss of a domestic caretaker whose readings would supply the visual translation of verses whose courtly language and historical references had become opaque to most nineteenth-century readers. The cycle accordingly pairs each waka with a landscape and figural composition whose contents are tangentially or interpretively rather than directly illustrative, allowing Hokusai to range across an unusually varied roster of subjects including peasant scenes, mountain landscapes, coastal views, courtly figures, and seasonal observances. Of the planned hundred, only twenty-seven prints were published in completed form, with surviving preparatory drawings indicating a substantial further body of designs that the artist completed but that the publisher abandoned, possibly because the cycle's commercial reception did not justify continuing the expensive multi-block color printing. The Hyakunin isshu cycle belongs to the late maturity of Hokusai's fukei-e production, alongside the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the Tour of the Waterfalls, and the Famous Bridges, and the surviving prints demonstrate the same compositional ambition and atmospheric refinement as those better-known projects while extending his repertoire into the classical-poetic subject for which the cycle's title prepared its audience. Modern scholarship reads the unfinished set as one of the most ambitious illustration projects ever attempted in Edo print culture, and the corpus is comprehensively represented in the holdings of the Sumida Hokusai Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where surviving impressions are valued both for their individual pictorial accomplishment and as witnesses to the abandoned hundred-print ambition that the project represents.

The One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki) series contains 1 prints, created by Katsushika Hokusai.

The One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki) series was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎).

We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the One Hundred Poems as Explained by the Wet Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.