Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

富嶽三十六景 Fugaku sanjūrokkei

Around 1830, when he was about seventy, Katsushika Hokusai began a set of landscape prints with a single subject. Mount Fuji appears in every one of them. Sometimes it fills the sheet; sometimes it is a small grey triangle behind a cooper’s barrel, a lumberyard, or a wave about to break. The series was published in Edo by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō), and it sold well enough that ten more prints were added to the original thirty-six.

Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1830–33. Forty-six woodblock prints.