Lake Suwa in Shinano Province (Shinshu Suwako), from the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)"c. 1830/33
Lake Suwa, in the mountains of Shinano Province, lies calm and blue, with Fuji rising faintly beyond the far shore. More about this work
About this work
Lake Suwa, in the mountains of Shinano Province, lies calm and blue, with Fuji rising faintly beyond the far shore. In Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai showed the mountain from every kind of vantage point, sometimes towering over the scene and sometimes, as here, a distant presence that ties a broad landscape together. The cool blues and the gentle gradation of colour in the sky, achieved by wiping ink across the woodblock before printing, are typical of the series.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A work made of color woodblock print; oban.
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
- 1925.3284
- 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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