Five Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji goban no uchi)
Fuji goban no uchi
About This Series
Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Five Views of Mount Fuji, the Fuji goban no uchi, belongs to the wave of Fuji-themed series that followed Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and its sequel and that engaged virtually every major designer of the 1830s and 1840s. The compact format of five views, rather than thirty-six or one hundred, marks the project as a focused homage to the mountain rather than an attempt to compete with Hokusai's encyclopedic ambition, and the smaller cycle allowed Kuniyoshi to give each sheet particular care in composition and palette. As fukei-e the prints adopt the standard repertoire of late Edo landscape printmaking: a strong foreground motif of human activity, season, or local landmark; a middle ground that organizes the recession; and Fuji itself rising in the distance as the unifying constant. Publisher and exact date should be verified against standard reference catalogues, but the series fits within the network of Edo houses that supplied Kuniyoshi landscape alongside his more celebrated warrior subjects. The prints reveal Kuniyoshi as a designer comfortable working in the lyrical mode that Hokusai and Hiroshige had made the central language of Edo landscape, while still bringing to it the strongly designed silhouettes and dramatic compositional accents that distinguished his musha-e production. Modern scholarship on the Edo Fuji print places the Goban no uchi within a broader landscape in which Fuji functioned as topographic fact, religious symbol, and national emblem, and the cycle is read as evidence of how thoroughly the Hokusai model had been internalized by his contemporaries. The Fuji goban no uchi prints continue to appear in collections of Kuniyoshi landscape and offer a useful corrective to the older view that he was primarily a designer of figures, demonstrating how naturally he could move into the contemplative register that defined the great Fuji sequences.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Five Views of Mount Fuji, the Fuji goban no uchi, belongs to the wave of Fuji-themed series that followed Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and its sequel and that engaged virtually every major designer of the 1830s and 1840s. The compact format of five views, rather than thirty-six or one hundred, marks the project as a focused homage to the mountain rather than an attempt to compete with Hokusai's encyclopedic ambition, and the smaller cycle allowed Kuniyoshi to give each sheet particular care in composition and palette. As fukei-e the prints adopt the standard repertoire of late Edo landscape printmaking: a strong foreground motif of human activity, season, or local landmark; a middle ground that organizes the recession; and Fuji itself rising in the distance as the unifying constant. Publisher and exact date should be verified against standard reference catalogues, but the series fits within the network of Edo houses that supplied Kuniyoshi landscape alongside his more celebrated warrior subjects. The prints reveal Kuniyoshi as a designer comfortable working in the lyrical mode that Hokusai and Hiroshige had made the central language of Edo landscape, while still bringing to it the strongly designed silhouettes and dramatic compositional accents that distinguished his musha-e production. Modern scholarship on the Edo Fuji print places the Goban no uchi within a broader landscape in which Fuji functioned as topographic fact, religious symbol, and national emblem, and the cycle is read as evidence of how thoroughly the Hokusai model had been internalized by his contemporaries. The Fuji goban no uchi prints continue to appear in collections of Kuniyoshi landscape and offer a useful corrective to the older view that he was primarily a designer of figures, demonstrating how naturally he could move into the contemplative register that defined the great Fuji sequences.
The Five Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji goban no uchi) series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
The Five Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji goban no uchi) series was created by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Five Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji goban no uchi) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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