Art Archive • Hokusai

Ukiyo-e

Hokusai Gallery (Guide)

From Fuji between the waves to lines of falling water and arches of bridges.

Katsushika Hokusai’s landscape prints, centered on Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — public-domain works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Katsushika Hokusai’s printmaking opened Edo visual culture to the world through compositional experiments and series—above all the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). Across a career of some seventy years he reinvented his style again and again; the landscape prints of his later years are prized for compositions that earlier ukiyo-e had seldom attempted.

This gallery draws on The Met’s public-domain holdings, centered on Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji—including South Wind, Clear Sky (Red Fuji), Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), and Storm below Mount Fuji. Planned as thirty-six designs, the series grew by ten more in response to its popularity and finally comprises forty-six prints. Mount Fuji is the stated subject, yet the lives and labors of people placed before it give the cycle its depth. Two sumō prints retain romaji wrestler names for now, because kanji forms have not yet been verified in primary sources.

Lines of water

A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces

諸国瀧廻り

Falling water broken into countless carved lines — motion and energy pressed directly into the woodblock.

Geometry of bridges

Remarkable Views of Bridges

諸国名橋奇覧

Arches and straight spans pushed to the foreground as geometric form, merging landscape with built structure.

High-resolution digital downloads (best-set JPEG/ZIP on SUZURI): Ukiyo-e digital downloads · 日本語.