History of Woodblock

Hokusai worked for seventy years under some thirty different art names, restlessly changing styles, studios, and even addresses — he is said to have moved house more than ninety times. By his own account he only began to understand the structure of nature in his seventies.

It was precisely then, around 1830–32, that he produced Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: forty-six designs (the series outgrew its own title) that view the mountain from tea houses, rooftops, rice fields, and the trough of a cresting sea. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, printed in the imported Prussian blue that gives our brand its primary color, became the most reproduced image in Japanese art.

That fame is directly relevant to what you buy here: demand from Europe — where the wave and the red Fuji stunned painters from Monet’s circle onward — kept publishers re-carving Hokusai’s blocks for more than a century, producing the spread of editions and conditions our listings compare.

Defining series: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–32) · 46 designs