Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido (Kisoji no oku Amidagataki), from the series "A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri)"About 1833
The Amida Falls, deep in the mountains along the Kiso Road, pour from the top of a sheer cliff, their name evoking the Buddha Amida. More about this work
About this work
The Amida Falls, deep in the mountains along the Kiso Road, pour from the top of a sheer cliff, their name evoking the Buddha Amida. Hokusai turns the water into a column of patterned lines and the rocks into bold, almost abstract shapes, while small figures rest on a ledge to one side, giving a sense of the scale of the place. The print belongs to A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces, a series of eight designs published around 1833, in which he treated falling water with endless invention.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A work made of color woodblock print; ōban.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Ōban
- The standard large Japanese print size, about 38 × 25 cm.
Katsushika Hokusai
Japanese, 1760–1849
Hokusai trained in the studio of the actor-portraitist Katsukawa Shunshō and went on to work under more than thirty names across a career of some seventy years. Alongside book illustration, paintings and the sketch volumes known as Hokusai Manga, he made landscape a leading subject of ukiyo-e with Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, issued around 1830–33, in which the mountain appears from city, coast and countryside, often in the newly imported Prussian blue.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1925.3394
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Department
- Arts of Asia
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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