A snow-white cone that dominates an entire pictorial composition through its silent presence alone: hardly any motif appears as frequently in the history of Japanese art as Fuji-San, at 3,776 meters the highest mountain in Japan. Painters, woodblock cutters, and calligraphers have immortalized it over more than a thousand years on hanging scrolls, color woodblock prints, screens, and armor – as a religious symbol as much as a national emblem. No other mountain in the world is the subject of a comparably dense and continuous pictorial tradition.
Early Depictions: From the Prince on the Mountain to the Rimpa Landscape
In the pictorial arts, Mount Fuji first appears around the 11th century. The handscroll "The Picturesque Biography of Prince Shōtoku" illustrates a legend according to which the statesman and patron of Buddhism Shōtoku Taishi rode a black horse over the summit of Fuji in the 6th century. Since Shōtoku's biography was repeatedly re-created in Japanese art, this conquest of the mountain is among the earliest surviving pictorial depictions of the mountain at all. It was not until the 17th century that Fuji moved to the fore as an independent landscape motif: painters of the Rimpa school depicted its characteristic silhouette in decorative, strongly simplified compositions – a style that, decades later, would help shape the visual language of the Ukiyo-e masters.
Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji"
Inseparably linked to Mount Fuji to this day is the color woodblock print series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" (Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) by Katsushika Hokusai. The artist made the first sketches in 1830, at the age of seventy, and himself noted in retrospect that none of his previous works could compare to this series. Its success rested on a compositional technique unusual for its time: some sheets let Mount Fuji fill the entire picture surface, while in others the majestic peak can be recognized only as a tiny but unmistakably present point on the horizon, while in the foreground the bustling everyday life of Edo unfolds. The most famous sheet of the series, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," shows Mount Fuji small between two enormous wave crests – a pictorial composition that made history. Mount Fuji remained present in Hokusai's late work as well: one of his last works, painted in 1849 at the age of ninety, was devoted once again to the sacred Mount Fuji, this time accompanied by a dragon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explicitly lists its impression of "The Great Wave" as a sheet from this series and dates it to approximately 1830 to 1832.
Hiroshige's Response and the View of Edo
In response to Hokusai's success, Andō Hiroshige created his own album "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" in 1852 – a homage and at the same time an artistic competition. Such prints were not only admired but were gladly purchased as souvenirs and gifts by pilgrims who had visited the mountain as part of the popular Fuji pilgrimages; the print runs were regularly sold out within a short time. Hiroshige's more extensive series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" also devotes conspicuously much space to the mountain: of 120 plates, 19 depict Mount Fuji, including the opening print "Nihombashi After the Snow," in which the snow-white peak rises above the wintry Nihombashi district. Viewing the mountain from the Nihombashi Bridge was a fixed New Year's custom in the Edo period.
Larger Than Reality: The Exalted Mountain
Nearly no significant artist of the Edo period failed to dedicate at least one of his works to Mount Fuji – the sacred mountain appears alike on canvases, paper screens, shōji sliding doors, hanging scrolls, mandalas, textiles, ceramics, and woodblock prints. It is striking that artists of the 18th and 19th centuries regularly depicted Fuji considerably larger than it could actually be seen from Edo. This deliberate exaggeration is typical of the Japanese pictorial tradition: it is not about a photographically accurate "true view," but about making visible the hidden, ideal form of an object – the way the mountain should appear in the collective consciousness. Behind this also lies the religious veneration of Fuji as the seat of deities: since the Edo period, Konohanasakuya-hime, the "Princess of the Blossoming Cherry Trees," has been regarded as the mountain's principal deity, while before that it was associated with the volcano deity Asama. In the medieval period, a Buddhist temple was also built on the summit; a mandala that survives to this day shows Buddha Amida and bodhisattvas enthroned on Mount Fuji.
From War Garment to Fujizuka: The Mountain in Everyday Life
The veneration of Fuji was not confined to painting in the narrower sense. In the late 16th century, warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi wore a wool surcoat called a "jin-baori," on the back of which the silhouette of a mountain with a spiral of "divine fire" was embroidered – an allusion to the legend that Fuji had once regularly emitted smoke and flames. Armor, helmets, saddles, knives, and shields frequently bore similar Fuji motifs. The veneration of the mountain also found expression outside the fine arts: in the cities, residents built "fujizuka," small replicas of Fuji about 15 meters high, complete with gate and shrine, which served as pilgrimage destinations for those who could not or did not wish to undertake the arduous ascent of the real mountain. One such mound is documented, for instance, in Hiroshige's woodblock print "New Fuji at Meguro." That the mountain remained a natural subject in art even after the end of the Edo period is shown by a Fuji album leaf in ink and color on silk by Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created around 1887.
Influence on Western Art
In the late 19th century, Hokusai's woodblock prints reached Europe and sparked great enthusiasm there. The French collector and writer Edmond de Goncourt, a well-known admirer of Japanese art, became one of the most influential advocates of Ukiyo-e in France and repeatedly pointed to their influence on the landscape painting of the Impressionists, foremost among them Claude Monet. Japanese color woodblock prints significantly shaped European Impressionism, and Hokusai's Fuji series was among the most influential models of what became known as Japonism. When Claude Debussy published his three orchestral pieces under the title "La Mer" in 1905, the publisher chose, of all things, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" for the sheet music cover – that print from Hokusai's Fuji series which is still regarded today as one of the most famous works of art in the world and which carried the fame of Fuji-San far beyond Japan.
Sources and Literature
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Acc. No. JP2569, metmuseum.org.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mount Fuji, Kawanabe Kyōsai, Acc. No. 14.76.61.3, metmuseum.org.
Timothy Clark (ed.): Hokusai. Beyond the Great Wave. Thames & Hudson / British Museum, London 2017.
