Poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse1835–36
Katsushika Hokusai designed this print series from the perspective of a confused nurse attempting to illustrate classical poetry but missing the subtle allusions. More about this work
About this work
Katsushika Hokusai designed this print series from the perspective of a confused nurse attempting to illustrate classical poetry but missing the subtle allusions. This interpretation creates what would have been considered a comical disconnect between poem and image. The poem on this print reads as follows: In the mountain village, it is in winter that my loneliness increases most, when I think of how both have dried up, the grasses and people’s visits. —Translation by Joshua Mostow While nobleman Minamoto no Muneyuki (died 939) wrote of dying grasses, the nurse imagines instead a lively scene of hunters warming themselves around a fire.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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.
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 Cleveland Museum of Art 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
- 1985.327
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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